Trutanich: "Hanging Out" Can Be a Crime

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich wants to give police the ability to arrest "taggers" simply for hanging out together, without having to catch them in the act -- raising thorny constitutional issues...Trutanich said his staff has begun amassing street-level intelligence and reviewing legal strategies that would pave the way for a series of injunctions targeting graffiti and "tagging" crews. The measures would be lawsuits of sorts, brought on behalf of the public, treating much of the graffiti that mars buildings and overpasses as a criminal enterprise and arguing that it has become such a nuisance that it requires an extraordinary police response.

The city has 43 injunctions targeting 71 gangs, including one rolled out earlier this year over a 13.7-square-mile area of South L.A., the largest in California. The tagging injunctions would focus on neighborhoods where graffiti is a particularly acute problem, such as the Harbor Gateway area, the San Fernando Valley and, especially, South L.A.

Trutanich said. "If you want to tag, be prepared to go to jail. And I don't have to catch you tagging. I can just catch you . . . with your homeboys."

In South Los Angeles, Police Capt. Mark Olvera said he feared that injunctions against taggers would be untenable. He also said it could blur the line that police use when confronting graffiti -- between hardened criminals who use graffiti to mark territory and challenge rivals, and aimless punks who try to enhance their street credibility by scribbling designs on lampposts, vans and buildings....he feared that targeting low-level taggers could undermine the city's efforts to combine traditional police suppression tactics with social-service programs that can steer at-risk youths onto a better path...,Though his proposal is still in its infancy, Trutanich said it would treat many graffiti vandals and taggers as like-minded members of a criminal enterprise and make it a crime for documented taggers to associate in public......Almost all of them, he argued, work in teams -- with lookouts who can help them access difficult-to-reach areas. The injunction would enjoin the members of a team from associating with one another in public -- making the association a crime, without any direct evidence of vandalism. Anyone targeted by the injunction would have been accused of tagging in the past, and Trutanich's office stressed that each individual injunction would be tailored to a specific problem in a specific neighborhood. Each injunction also would require a judge's approval.