Violence Essay

Maria Hicks was shot in the head when she flashed her headlights at teens tagging a wall—this story was not enough to keep my mouth shut when I saw a guy tagging the bathroom door in Santa Monica at the beach on my walk. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he replied, as he started to walk away from the door.

“I saw you tagging.” I see a white Santa Monica beach truck and wave my arms, flagging it down, screaming, “This guy is tagging up the bathroom!”

Two beach maintenance men appear on the scene as another kid comes out of the bathroom. One of the men calls 911 on his cell phone and starts reporting the incident. He is describing the kids as they start walking away from the scene of the crime, calm, smooth, slick. They look at me. “Bitch, I should fuck you up.”

I yell, “Add threats to vandalism!” With this, the boys change their saunter to a scamper, holding their slouching pants as they run off.

The beach maintenance men, Carlos and Leroy, see this all the time. They don’t approach the taggers in the act, nor do they confront them…this is what they are taught in their training. I suppose this makes sense, in the real world, but I am a high school teacher, safe within the public school system where we thrive on finding vandals and using the evidence as reason for an opportunity transfer, aka, getting them out of our school. Bill and Tyrone stick around so they can talk to the police, but I proceed with my walk, heading up to the pier. On my way back, I see Bill and Tyrone again, but the police never came. Bill said there is an entire crew dedicated to painting over tagging, and come tomorrow morning, they will paint over the door and it will be like it never happened. When I get home, I called the Santa Monica police to find out why no one ever stopped by to document the incident.

I spoke with a woman on the phone who told me the cops had found the young lads who admitted to being confronted by a white woman who had mistakenly thought they were tagging. After the cops had identified them, they released them. I gave my name and number to the woman on the phone saying that I would like the incident documented and would be available as a witness.

Weeks later, a detective called me. I was to pick out the guys out of a photo line up. Picking pictures out of a line up is no easy task. I am all too well aware of the stories like Ronald Cotton, the documentaries like Murder On A Sunday Morning…there is quite a bit of error in the eye witness account.

I hit the jack pot on the one that threatened my life, but the one actually tagging the door, I didn’t identify. Afterward, I remembered he had a lot of acne. But the detective’s number was buried in a cabinet and I was defeated, knowing that society is never ahead when it comes to graffiti. LA County spends 30 million a year trying to clean up the chicken scratch of various vandals. Meanwhile, there isn’t enough money to fund education, which is why I was so infuriated in the first place, I suppose. I thought about my honor students who live in this quasi fear going to public school with this gang mentality, territorial, violent, ready to shoot a woman in the head for flashing her lights. The adolescents that spray painted a 6-year-old boy’s eyes as he witnessed their scribbling gang signs.

I have been advised not to confront taggers again. “It’s not worth the risk,” I was told.