Graffiti increase in Costa Mesa a disturbing trend

Despite a doubling in the amount of graffiti this year, Costa Mesa Police Department officers are saying that the understandable and initial reaction to the news is misguided: The “tagging” isn’t being done by gangs and isn’t a sign of increased gang activity.

Although that may be a relief, it doesn’t mean the increase isn’t a problem. At the least, the jump from 108 reported cases of graffiti in the first half of 2005 to 200 in the first half of this year is a costly one for the city and an unsettling one for residents.

“It’s a very visible sign of social disorder,” Costa Mesa Police Capt. Ron Smith told the Daily Pilot. “We just don’t like it.”

Smith, who presented details about the problem at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, described the problem as cyclical. He told the council ? near the end of the meeting ? that a couple of taggers are mainly responsible for the vandalism and that it is a small group “that hits us hard.” In answer to council questions, he also said that the taggers are Costa Mesa youth who consider themselves artists, not vandals.

The taggers’ identification of themselves as artists, not criminals, points out the difficulty of handling this problem. It probably also explains why the same people are arrested repeatedly for tagging ? they don’t see what they are doing as wrong but as self-expression. Their actions, of course, run directly against what’s lawful: A person simply can’t deface property.

Still, punishment alone doesn’t seem to be abating the problem. At the council meeting, Councilwomen Katrina Foley and Linda Dixon suggested other ways of controlling graffiti, including setting aside public walls for graffiti art. Their ideas received no support from Mayor Allan Mansoor and Councilman Eric Bever. Lacking a change of heart on the council ? or Councilman Gary Monahan siding with Foley and Dixon on this issue ? such intervention doesn’t seem a likely course in Costa Mesa, though Smith did say that alternate methods of enforcement have worked elsewhere. That may leave graffiti a lingering problem in Costa Mesa.

At least it isn’t a gang-related one.