City plans vigorous crackdown on taggers

Denise Cardinal

Thursday, Oct. 16, 1997 | 10:11 a.m.

You spray, you pay.

That's the theme of a new city ordinance being proposed by Las Vegas Councilman Michael McDonald, who has noticed that middle-class kids are now responsible for much of the graffiti vandalism around town.

"These kids, the taggers, aren't who you think they are," McDonald says. The councilman, a Metro Police officer, says no longer are graffiti vandals primarily from the poor sides of town. "They're mostly middle class."

The city would be considered a victim in cases of graffiti vandalism under his ordinance. With victim status, the city could sue adult taggers or the parents of juvenile taggers in civil court.

Vandals or their parents could be hit with judgments in excess of $10,000.

The city's graffiti hotline has received about 1,900 calls since July. The damages in the city exceed $50 million a year. Nationally, citizens pay more than $8 billion a year to pay for graffiti cleanup.

McDonald says hitting parents in the pocketbook will make them more likely to pay attention to what their kids are doing. McDonald isn't the only Metro officer to observe that today's tagger is apt to be from a middle-class family.

"Some are even from well-off families," said Metro Police officer Eric Holyoak, who works graffiti cases. "They're not what you'd consider a stereotypical gang member."

Two years ago in the Peccole Ranch development, for example, every wall in the area was covered with graffiti.

"The community was furious," said City Councilman Arnie Adamsen, who represents the development, which is west of Buffalo Drive and south of Charleston Boulevard.

Adamsen said graffiti vandals have also struck The Lakes, south of Peccole Ranch. "A lot of juveniles have too much time on their hands," Adamsen said.

And that time is often unsupervised.

With most two-income families finding it hard to even eat dinner together, parents can't always keep track of where their children are. It's a problem that can lead to tagging, which officers say, doesn't always matter to parents.

"A lot of times, the parent know," said Holyoak. "They've allowed the kids to tag their walls in their room, their fence in the yard. They know what the kids are doing."

He said it's hard to make parents understand the seriousness of graffiti vandalism. Holyoak said he was once talking to a tagger at school when his mother showed up.

"She just started making excuses for him, saying he's not a bad kid," Holyaok said of the incident.

McDonald says parents will think harder about such excuses if they know their darlings' colorful squiggles on public property might cost them $10,000 or more.