The Santa Maria River bed holds a clear record of who’s been through recently. The tracks of deer, blue belly lizards, and mice wind through the gravely sand alongside footprints from walkers or joggers, sometimes with dogs. Underneath the bridge, sneaker prints reveal fewer athletic treads, and the towering concrete pillars that hold up the road above are surrounded by the imprints of skate shoes and Converse.
Other marks are there, too—but not in the sand. These telltale signs of human presence can be found on the smooth, flat surfaces that sit in the shade. Simple patterns, looping or jagged, testify to a visit from someone wielding a single spray can. Other, larger pieces boast several colors and appear to have required the use of intricate or time-consuming techniques.
Whether big or small, simple or complex, artistic or gang-related, all of the markings—aka graffiti—are considered vandalism by the city of Santa Maria.
“We’re out there almost every day,” said Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department Recreation Technician Gabriel Velasco. “Graffiti doesn’t stop on the weekends.”
Velasco organizes the department’s Neighborhood Restoration Program, which includes such services as shopping cart retrieval and graffiti abatement. Locals are encouraged to dial the city’s graffiti hotline, where callers can leave a message detailing the whereabouts of tags spotted in the city.
“It’s pretty steady,” Velasco said. “We average maybe 20 calls on the hotline per week.”
The Recreation and Parks Department employees also know to check in on what are called graffiti “hot spots” in town—places that are tagged regularly—especially keeping a keen eye on the gangs’ favorite locations. Tags that are threatening, vulgar, or violent are removed as soon as possible, especially if they’re easily visible from main throughways in town.
The Neighborhood Restoration Program is armed with more than just paint and a pressure washer—it employs a sophisticated system of cataloguing the different types of graffiti crime. This system aids the Santa Maria Police Department in keeping track of local gangs as well as individual taggers or “tagging crews.” The distinction is an important one for the SMPD to make in order to track gangs and properly charge vandals when caught, explained Police Chief Ralph Martin.
“Graffiti can actually be helpful to use when identifying monikers of gang members,” he said. “It is a tool that we use when our gang experts testify in court. Conversely, it’s a blight. It tears down neighborhoods and devalues homes.”
Varying vandals
Under a powerful morning sun, two Santa Maria Recreation and Parks employees wielding paint rollers and gallon buckets filled with tan recycled paint began covering a gang tagging at the corner of Donovan and Broadway. The side of a brick wall—which serves as the barrier between the Broadway shopping center and the Evans Park projects, the home of the North Park gang—was covered in large, spindly black letters, obviously sprayed on quickly. The tagging bore a threatening message to the rival gang West Park, including English and Spanish vulgarity and a warning: “Watch out.”
Before covering over the crude writing, staffers took a picture with a camera designed especially for a program called Graffiti Tracker that city staff, including Santa Maria Police officers, use to track trends, gang tags, and individual taggers.
“Once it takes the picture, the location is logged,” Velasco said. “The square footage of the graffiti is logged; we log whether it was painted or pressure washed and how much it cost.”
At the end of the graffiti abatement team’s day, Velasco loads all of the images into the Graffiti Tracker database. The database includes a GPS coordinate of each tag and can link separate occurrences by the same tagger via the style and moniker used, and it can also alert police of threatening gang messages.
City staff and SMPD officers note the distinction between gang tagging and vandalism created by what the department calls “taggers” or “tagging crews.”
“We know that not all taggers are gang members; they are a unique, different class,” Chief Martin said. “They do it for the notoriety.”
Vandals unaffiliated with gangs have their own language to describe their brand of blatantly illegal urban art, explained Michael Castillo, a local graphic designer who, in 2010, found himself facing several felony charges for years’ worth of his tagging.
“We don’t call each other taggers; we call each other writers,” he said. “A tag is a signature. Then there is a bombing, which is throwing up quick block letters, just two or three colors max. And the last is piecing, which is really intricate and takes a few hours to get done.”
Castillo, who admits to tagging his moniker “Kerse805” just about everywhere he could, from local train yards to carving it into bathroom mirrors, was caught before the city used the Graffiti Tracker program. Back then, he explained, the department used Polaroid pictures.
“They had books of my stuff. I was like, ‘Dang, you guys have more pictures of my stuff than I do,’” he said. “I asked them for a copy of it, but they said no.”
Once caught, Castillo had to provide recompense for all of the vandalism in which the department could prove he had a part. If taggers use monikers and voice a unique style, that choice can provide an easy link between different acts of vandalism, even across long periods of time. The Graffiti Tracker program the city uses streamlines that process, saving hours of city staff time spent digging through filing cabinets.
“If you can show one person is responsible for a variety of tagging, then the court can add up all of those and charge them with a felony,” Martin said.
Castillo found himself facing five felonies for his collected and documented tags around the city. After giving presentations to city planners and advocating for the legalization of tagging under the Santa Maria River Bridge, he found his sentence reduced—but Castillo still paid thousands of dollars in fines and worked hours of community service after convicted.
Ultimately, his plan was never approved.
“I proceeded with the legalization of the riverbed in order to save my ass,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to get legalized, but I did want it to. My rationale was that legalizing the riverbed would get the graffiti out of town.”
A daily battle
Though most of the Santa Maria River Bridge columns remain blank, recent efforts by taggers are visible on some of the northernmost columns. The underside of the bridge looks nothing like it did even five years ago, when the graffiti was more widespread. Local church and community groups painted over the bridge’s entire underside in 2010 before the widening project began. And the graffiti abatement team checks the area regularly, although it still spends most of its time in town.
“We try to get it off or painted over in between 24 and 48 hours,” said Velasquez with Recreation and Parks. “The quicker we get it down, the more it encourages them not to tag in that spot. That’s our experience, anyway.”
Within the world of taggers—who do sometimes organize into crews, though they aren’t often gang affiliated—the longer a tag remains up, the more exposure it gets, since more eyes have a chance to see it. As with any artist, the desire to be seen is what drives vandals to attempt particularly intricate or daring tags.
“It was like hits on Facebook: You didn’t want to post where no one sees it,” Castillo said. “That’s what most of the kids are doing now—they are hiding, doing it in tunnels.”
The city keeps its efforts narrowed in on city property, though city staffers will paint over graffiti on local businesses if proprietors provide the paint. Other cost-saving measures include buying recycled paint and pressure washing when possible. The graffiti abatement program also began including employee hours on the weekend, after Measure U was passed, Velasquez explained.
According to Castillo, the aggressive removal, accompanied by tactics used by the SMPD, have squelched what used to be a busy community of urban artistic vandals.
“There’s too many rats around here, kids who get popped and rat on their friends,” Castillo said. “I’ve seen entire crews go down because of one rat.”
The city hasn’t made an effort to provide a legal home for local graffiti art, the realization of which many people would consider to be an endorsement of the act. But even if such a space were created, Castillo candidly remarked, it wouldn’t do anything to stop taggers.
“The only way to stop graffiti is to make spray paint and markers illegal,” he said. “Graffiti is wild. It has to stay in the jungle.”
Castillo hasn’t tagged since before he was convicted, he said, claiming he has too much to risk by going to jail—including a family and a graphic designing job that employs his artistic skills.
The city remains firm on its stance toward graffiti, no matter the level of expertise employed. Each tag—from a marker scrawl on a light pole to a 10-foot-high piece—is treated with the same process of cataloguing and removal.
“You can’t call most of it art,” Velasco said. “I would say 95 percent of it is just writing on the wall.”
The city of Santa Maria, including the police department, recommends that young artists seek out legal avenues of self-expression, as there are consequences to even the most minor vandalism. People still compelled to break the law may only see their tag up for a few hours during the day before it’s removed.
Still, the indiscretion will live on—but only in a database designed to aid local law enforcers and prosecutors in catching and punishing the person who put the paint up in the first place.
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 2, 2014.