Las Vegas Police targeting taggers

Adrienne Packer

Wednesday, July 28, 1999 | 10:37 a.m.

Eight years ago Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detective Dan Newman captured a 14-year-old boy spray-painting colorful initials throughout the city. The conversation he had with the young "tagger" still gnaws at him.

"When I arrested him I asked why he does this and he said, 'I want to wreck your property,' " Newman remembered the graffiti vandal saying.

The teen's punishment was insignificant. But that was years ago, before Metro Police seriously cracked down on vandals and before Clark County launched one of the most aggressive graffiti abatement programs in the nation.

Striking artwork - which appears overnight on overpasses, train cars and homeowners' walls - is now dated and photographed before county or city workers cover it up. The photos are logged into a computer where detailed and damning cases are built against the valley's most destructive tagging crews.

The 14-year-old boy is now 22 and still spray-paints - tags - private property, police say. He and two of his tagging gang members are now out of action, police say.

Metro arrested Steve McLeroy, 22, Justin Gross, 21, and Cameron Jensen, 21, last week on suspicion of vandalism stemming from spray-painted artwork on railroad cars and Highland Avenue businesses, according to police.

Now instead of a petty fine, the three were placed in the Clark County Detention Center in lieu of $250,000 bail each for allegedly causing what police have estimated at $2 million worth of damage.

Their group is only one tagging gang of an estimated 100 in Clark County. Police believe there are about 500 taggers in all who keep government painters busy.

But while they are far outnumbered, officials in Clark County are not discouraged.

"I have a feeling we just may conquer this," Jim Foreman, director of the county's public response office, said.

Foreman recently started the Southern Nevada Graffiti Coalition, a group made up of representatives of the county, each of its cities, Metro and the school district.

One of the committee's first tasks was to start a hotline to take phone calls from residents and business owners wishing to report vandalism.

Members have infiltrated neighborhoods and schools with some 55,000 pamphlets explaining that taggers can cause million of dollars worth of damage and they can be anybody's children.

Newman said despite certain stereotypes, most taggers are white males from middle-class families. They take buses or cars to fences or signs in clear view of major thoroughfares and get to work.

When Clark County Commissioner Dario Herrera ran for his seat in November, he vowed to join fellow board member Myrna Williams in her fight to address graffiti. Herrera said 66 percent of the hotline calls come from their districts.

"During the campaign I heard time and time again that the first sign of urban blight or the first sign of crime is graffiti," Herrera said. "As a homeowner, it has to be demoralizing.

"I think for a long time there was a sense that nobody cared about this issue. My colleagues on the commission realize that this is an issue we should care about. It's valleywide."

During the last budget session, Foreman received funds for a third painter. His department currently receives about $84,000 for paints and supplies and another $100,000 to pay painters' salaries and for their trucks.

Donny Morgan might know more about graffiti than anyone. Every day he tosses grays, beiges and off-white paints into the back of his pickup and cruises around town searching for spray-painted walls, bridges or detention basins.

After two years, the county painter is familiar with the battles going on among tagging crews. He knows who has what initials and which group has the most impressive artwork.

"Some of this stuff you'd have to see to believe. They know how to do block letters and 3-D stuff," he said. "Sometimes I feel like it's a shame to paint over some of these things, but then I get all my lines out and off it goes."

Morgan said that since the coalition has started its education program and offered free paint to volunteers who want to cover up vandalism in their own neighborhood, he finds himself making fewer trips to the same sites.

"When I started here, we couldn't keep up with it," he said. "This is a real big issue. A lot of people don't realize it, but it's a huge issue."

While the courts have forced vandals to pay private residents and businesses restitution for damage done to their property, it has only been recently that the county has been listed as a victim.

Foreman said because of the extensive file cases kept by the county and the fact that it spends the money to clean up sites - which 90 percent of the time are sound walls facing major arterials - money is starting to trickle in.

Last year the county received $6,550 in restitution from vandals or, if the spray-painting artists are juveniles, their parents.

Foreman said the county's third painter, who will be hired on the first of the fiscal year, will focus on obscene graffiti or vandalism done to schools or along resort corridors.

"We'll get the ones that really bother people. If it's offensive, we can zip it off quickly," he said.