Five held in sweep by L.B. police; graffiti cleanup costs city $500,000 yearly.
LONG BEACH — When police descended on the Central Long Beach apartment of a 14-year-old suspected tagger early Thursday, his instinct was to leap out of his second-story bedroom window.
But when the skinny youth, clad only in plaid boxer shorts and white socks, peered past the ripped window screen and into the harsh glare of a police flashlight and the barrels of officers' guns he abandoned any attempt at escape.
After a scuffle with his 17-year-old sister, and an illuminating discussion with his mother who told detectives she doesn't care what her son does outside of the house, as long as he doesn't scrawl graffiti on their property the 14-year-old youth joined four other people arrested in a series of predawn raids carried out by the Gang Enforcement Division Long Beach Police Department.
"We are so excited," said Det. Kim Maddox as she sat with her partner, Det. Sharon van Duin, at downtown police headquarters at about 4 a.m. "This is the first time Long Beach has ever done anything like this. We've been waiting for this for years."
What Maddox, van Duin, and several of their colleagues have been waiting for is the chance to tell taggers youths who pick a nickname or "tag," and spread it throughout a city with graffiti that Long Beach has zero tolerance for their costly criminal behavior.
Thursday's raid, which saw teams of detectives swarm 17 homes throughout the city, Maddox said, was designed to make that point abundantly clear.
Because most taggers are juveniles, they can be arrested several times before they see any real legal penalties. Maddox, who with van Duin, specializes in fighting graffiti, estimated that most of the taggers she has tracked have been arrested nine or 10 times before they are slapped with probation, then eventually sentenced to time in the California Youth Authority, a juvenile detention center or a CYA camp.
While taggers typically aren't considered as violent as gang members, the toll their crimes take on a community, property owners and businesses is staggering. According to FBI statistics, graffiti removal costs the American public around $4 billion a year.
Long Beach spends about $500,000 on graffiti removal a year, and this summer has proved particularly bad for graffiti.
"They're in it for the fame," Maddox says. "The more they get their name or their moniker out there, the more fame they achieve."
In addition to the impact on a community's property values and psyche, Maddox points out that tagging crews have evolved into gangs and taggers are often recruited by gang members to commit lower-level crimes as well as hide drugs, weapons and other evidence.
In the case of the 14-year-old, his tagging crew started out as a party crew, a group of youths who would get together and dance and hang out. Then some of them came up with names for themselves and began scrawling then around the city.
"Now they've 'cliqued' up with a gang," Maddox said, declining to identify any of the tagging groups or gangs because, she says, "it gives them publicity. They brag about (it). And then you have their rivals stirring stuff up because they don't want to be outdone."
Several officers who participated in the raids said that rivalry has been extremely high among certain groups, and has sparked deadly confrontations in the past.
In front of several of the homes served with search warrants, monikers and tagging crew names were scratched into glass and scrawled in chalk, acrylic paint and ink on sidewalks, utility poles, street signs, walls and even inside some of the arrested youths' homes.
Most of the parents van Duin and Maddox deal with are either unaware of their teens' behavior or don't know how to stop them, she says.
A few are like the 14-year-old's mother, who chastised police for harassing her son.
"I asked him if he tags inside his house and he said 'No, I only tag on city property," said Det. Johnny Miyasaki.