Fresno taggers stake out territory with violence

Ten homicides among 174 incidents since '09.

By Alex Tavlian and Ezra Romero - The Fresno Bee Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012 | 03:17 AM Preparing to open his southeast Fresno tire shop one recent morning, Michael Poulsen noticed something out of the corner of his eye. Poulsen, general manager of Ball Tire, spotted two boys around the age of 10 eyeing a chain-link fence with plastic woven through it. "One kid was tagging the fence with a magic marker," Poulsen said. "So I went out to stop him." Tagging is a regular nuisance for Poulsen, whose shop gets hit with grafti about three times a week, but he encountered a new problem on June 18. "The punk said, 'I'm going to go home, grab my .45 (caliber gun) and shoot your ass,' " Poulsen said. Then, the two kids biked off -- but didn't return. The threat reects an alarming trend among Fresno's taggers. Increasingly they're staking out their territory with violence. It's usually tagger-on-tagger as they attack with guns and knives anyone who covers up their designs. But innocent bystanders an artist working near a wall co-opted by taggers, a city worker assigned to paint over grafti and business owners like Poulsen can wind up in harm's way.

Since 2009, when the Fresno Police Department rst started tracking a surge in violent incidents, there have been 174 shootings and stabbings including 10 homicides committed by tagging crews, ofcials said. "We started to see periodic violent crimes," Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said. "Then they turned into spikes. Now, it's a trend." Last year, two high-prole tagger homicides occurred in Fresno. Nicholas "Nico" Quiroz, 15, a member of Roosevelt High's rugby team, was stabbed to death Feb. 27, 2011, in central Fresno, by a rival tagger. Seventeen-year-old Junior Villarreal, who was unarmed, was stabbed March 28, 2011, during a brawl among taggers just a few blocks from Sunnyside High while school was in session. His death sparked a series in The Bee about Fresno Unied School District's high dropout and truancy rates, which led to formation of the district's Graduation Task Force. City programs to target taggers have been gutted by budget cuts. And while leaders agree more must be done, they disagree on how to stop the violence.

Taggers' targets
The violent trend surfaced two months ago at the Chris M. Sorensen Studio near Fresno's historic archway on Van Ness Avenue. A visiting artist working on a metal sculpture was nearly caught in crossre between two rival tagging crews who were battling over the cover-up of a tag on a wall designated for public artwork. "We came back after lunch and he handed me an empty .09 (millimeter) shell casing and explained what happened," studio artist liaison Kerby Smith said. "That's when we were really soured on (taggers)."

Even members of the city's grafti abatement team, tasked with covering up grafti, have been threatened and attacked. In 2005, a crew member was attacked in Hyde Park near Edison High by a tagger wielding a baseball bat, said crew member Cornell Contreras. Since then, some of the abatement team's paint trucks have been equipped with police radios. Violent taggers represent only a small minority of the city's tagging crews, ofcials said. Currently, police estimate Fresno has about 1,000 tagging crews made up of as few as one or two to dozens of members, Fresno police Sgt. Bill Grove said. Only 39 crews are known to be involved in violent crime. After years of investigating and mining data, Fresno police discovered a pattern showing when taggers advance from vandals to heavy-hitting criminals. Taggers generally start at age 12. By the time they reach junior high, they've begun tagging regularly, started to compile criminal records and may be on probation -- all while their reputations grow. Many taggers join crews during their high school years. By their late teens, taggers are considered veterans in crews that resort to ganglike crimes shootings, stabbings, assaults and homicides. A veteran tagger of around 18 who would identify himself only as "Sunk" said his generation solved disputes with their sts. For him, tagging is an artistic outlet, a means to build something with his skill, not a game of one-upmanship that destroys someone else's work. But younger taggers hope to gain fame and attention quickly, he said, and when scufes occur they wind up pulling a gun. "That's more with the new generation, because every crew is backed up by a gang," said Sunk, whose crew has a dozen or so members from Kerman, Madera and Fresno.

The violence, Dyer said, results from the constant back-and-forth of taggers placing their monikers over another tagger's. Eventually, frustrated taggers may start carrying guns to discourage others from covering their tags. Jorja Leap, a professor of social welfare at the University of California at Los Angeles, said many taggers are gang afliates, placing them at the center of gang violence, while others are acting out as adolescents and fail to consider the consequences of their actions, she said. Taggers are narcissistic by nature, said Dyer and Gabriel Hernandez, a Fresno native and former tagger who runs a Christian anti-tagging ministry. "Their goal is to have their tag stay up as long as possible," the chief said. His crew "would go out on tagging missions and try to top people," Hernandez said. "If someone had a name at a certain height, we would do whatever it took to get ours one level higher or even the top of a building."

Cleaning up tags
In a small building tucked in Fresno's municipal yard downtown, Jet Lim meets daily with members of the city's grafti abatement team and maps out the latest reports of grafti they need to paint over. Lim, the team's head, has seen the city's priorities shift since he started in 1994, the year then-Mayor Jim Patterson declared war on grafti and described the city as "out of control." Patterson created the grafti bureau, a police effort that investigated school vandalism, went undercover and collected information for the Automatic Grafti Enforcement Database that tracks taggers and stores images of their monikers for reference.

Budget cuts forced the bureau's investigative unit to disband in 2011 and Lim's crew became the only line of defense against rampant grafti. The team has grown from two part-time workers using paint rollers to 11 full-time employees with more specialized equipment. If it weren't for the team, "Fresno would look a lot like Los Angeles," police Lt. Jose Garza said. The city is shelling out more than $800,000 yearly for the grafti abatement program, but the fact it has remained intact is a sign of its importance, Mayor Ashley Swearengin said. Studies have shown that crime rises in areas where grafti or broken windows signal that no one is watching out for property. While the abatement team survived, the Tagger-to-Work program, which placed convicted nonviolent taggers on community service work details, fell victim to money woes. Dyer laments its loss. "The program was extremely effective because if they failed to show up there were consequences," he said. The program was ended due to its cost estimated at more than $250,000 yearly and the complications of getting taggers to work sites, Lim said. Jim Winton, owner of Vista Pharmacy near Roosevelt High, said he would like Taggerto-Work to return. "I think they should make taggers paint over grafti from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and it would only take a couple of days before they would get tired of it," Winton said. "I would be in for a program like that, but that won't happen because the city is broke."

Stemming the tide

City leaders and experts suggest three courses of action to ght grafti and discourage taggers from becoming violent. Swearengin believes the city should focus less on police enforcement and more on cleanup, with the help of community groups. If grafti disappears promptly, taggers lose the chance to paint over another tagger's work, and that could decrease violence, she said. "There is no way we can produce enough police ofcers to stop [grafti] before it goes up," she said. Leap, the professor of social welfare at UCLA, offered another option: Give taggers places to paint. "Providing some very low-cost alternatives like classes or tagging walls ... is the kind of thing [cities] need to make available," she said. Dyer said the city needs to continue abatement efforts, but those must be balanced with community outreach, heavier enforcement and more severe punishment for nonviolent taggers. "The consequences have not been high enough" to deter taggers from advancing into violence, he said. Taggers arrested for vandalism or other nonviolent crimes are released earlier from jail or Juvenile Hall than other offenders. Dyer said Fresno County's overburdened criminal justice system allows repeat offenders to win release over and over. A new strategy for Fresno police aims to erase the distinction between gangs and tagging crews by validating crews as gangs, which will increase the seriousness of charges. Currently only one Fresno-based tagging crew is a validated street gang -- Highly Insane Criminals.

Ofcers from Fresno's anti-gang unit, the Multi-Agency Gang Enforcement Consortium, labeled HIC as a street gang in 2004 after members were arrested in connection with a slew of kidnappings and home-invasion robberies, Grove said. The task of policing violent taggers will require a focused law enforcement effort, Swearengin and Dyer agree. But at what price? Swearengin believes the current force is sufcient for the task, but Dyer is pushing for more ofcers. Just like the alternatives for nonviolent taggers, ghting off the growing population of violent taggers carries a hefty price tag. With the city's precarious budget, adding new programs to handle this growing problem seems unlikely. Poulsen, the tire store owner, gures it's up to the community: "If you don't stand up to them, who's going to do it?