Los Angeles' War on Street Artists

The fallen street legend is almost too humiliated to admit that the only work he's been able to find — through a program that helps ex-felons — is buffing out graffiti for a company contracted by L.A. City Hall.

"It hurts. It sucks," he says. "I love graffiti — I don't want to take down no graffiti."

The job, Sight says, is ruining his identity and credibility; he would rather do anything else in the world. Before the buffing gig, Sight worked part-time for the same company as an alley cleaner, where he picked up "trash, shit buckets, dead cats and rats."

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Sight, now a father whose felonies keep him out of good jobs.

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Smear: "I go see a counselor every week about my anxiety disorder. Just the paranoia — every time you're in your house, you don't know if they're going to come get you."

Details

See also:
How the City of Gardena Turns Every Piece of Graffiti Into a Felony Crime

The Secrets of L.A. Street Art: Bumblebee, Sharktoof and Linelinedot Discuss Their Work

Fuck New York: Street Art Began Here in L.A.

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More About

• Carmen Trutanich
• Metropolitan Transportation Authority
• Lee Baca
• Visual Arts
• Street Art

He would do it again in an instant if it offered the same long hours he needs to support his family.

His girlfriend, a full-time vendor at Staples Center, says Sight doesn't write poetry or talk about the future anymore. "It's almost like his spirit kind of died," Avila says.

That's what he gets for messing with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — and, in effect, messing with the Special Problems Unit of Sheriff Baca's Transit Services Bureau, whose sole job is to ferret out troublemakers on the Metro system.

The unit is widely recognized as one of the most ruthless and effective anti-graffiti task forces on Earth, and it has mastered the all-crew takedown, according to critics such as the ACLU and admirers such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Sight and his crew, UPN, were among the Special Problems Unit's first big trophies.

L.A.'s rampant graffiti problem, a major source of public outcry, has been called an "epidemic" by county Supervisor Gloria Molina and "a problem that demands action" by City Councilman José Huizar. The city spends about $7 million and the county about $30 million per year on graffiti removal and etching repair. More than $8 million of that goes to fixing Metro property.

"When we have a target, it starts on Metro," says Sgt. Christian Meadows, second in command at the Special Problems Unit. The team's jurisdiction is any Metro property, including subway cars, stations or buses.

In 2010, some 20 deputies and sergeants in the Special Problems Unit served 414 "social media" search warrants on Twitter and other accounts and conducted 96 probation or parole searches — resulting in 183 felony and 173 misdemeanor arrests.

The tagger roundup is accelerated by digital-age technology: Not only do deputies snoop through social media accounts, but a new, game-changing graffiti database called T.A.G.R.S. allows them to browse through its extensive, countywide photo archive for suspects' scrawled monikers.

The tie between graffiti and public transit runs deep. Hard-core L.A. gangsters have been marking up the city since the early 20th century. But nongang graffiti in the wildstyle form was born decades later, on the New York City subway system in the turmoil-filled protest society of the 1970s.

So crews such as Sight's UPN — also called Under Pigs' Noses or Ur Property Next — are posing a direct challenge to the Sheriff's Transit Services Bureau when they scrawl or scratch their letters on Metro property. "Ever since the beginning of tagging, it's been kind of a cat-and-mouse thing" between cops and the taggers who taunt them, says Special Problems Unit detective Michael Thibodeaux. "That's part of the excitement to it."

The key, for Baca's bunch, was learning how to round up the mice en masse — and finding a Los Angeles prosecutor and courts that would go along.

Perhaps the most brazen cop taunt in the history of L.A. graffiti was staged by the crew MTA, or Metro Transit Assassins, in 2008.

Unidentified Metro Transit Assassin members used hundreds of gallons of paint to tag the huge, slanted side of a concrete Los Angeles River bank near the Fourth Street Bridge and 101 freeway with "MTA." That name, of course, belonged to the wealthy transit authority they were mocking, an agency that has steadily cut the region's heavily used bus service for poor minorities while pouring billions into far less utilized rail lines for white-collar commuters. The giant, 3-D block letters, thought to form America's largest tag, were 30 feet tall and a half-mile wide.

No plane, train nor freeway commuter within eyeshot could avoid bearing witness.

The Metro Transit Assassins, even those who did not participate, were punished accordingly.

Because Baca's underlings couldn't prove who did it, they rounded up 11 taggers linked to MTA — including rising graffiti artist Smear, who had begun selling his works in galleries — and, supported by L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, built a backbreaking civil lawsuit against them.

Dangling a $3.7 million cleanup cost before them, Trutanich offered the defendants a deal: If they paid off their previous graffiti damage in L.A., did community service and promised to be good, Trutanich would forgive the alleged $3.7 million in damages.

But the young people were in fact agreeing to far more: a watershed settlement that, according to the city attorney's office, creates the world's first "tagger injunction." It can be used much like a gang injunction and opens the door for more such "tagger injunctions" against other graffiti crews.

To the art world, crews like MTA are collaborative groups that encourage creativity and growth. But the injunction would let cops arrest anyone tied to MTA, or to any other crew slapped with a similar injunction, merely for hanging out together in public, carrying a can of spray paint or violating a 10 p.m. curfew.