Cracking down on Portland's 'tagger tourism'

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) -- Almost a decade ago, the Portland Police Bureau had a Graffiti Task Force, but it was disbanded in 2015 due to a shrinking number of officers. Since then, Portland has become a top spot for what Officer Nathan Kirby-Glatkowski calls "tagger tourism"—people traveling from other areas to spray paint illegally.

Since the pandemic, "there's just a proliferation of graffiti everywhere," Glatkowski said. "This is not a victimless crime. If you’re out here damaging our communities night after night after night in these big impactful ways, we're coming after you and we'll get you."

Now, authorities aim to bring the graffiti vandals to justice like never before, and Multnomah County prosecutors put Portland's most prolific tagger behind bars.

"This is a pretty hefty prison sentence for a property crime," Deputy District Attorney Keegan Matosich said.

'You're under arrest'

On the day KOIN 6 News rode along with police chasing taggers, Glatkowski's shift got off to a fast start after a crime tip there was a tagger on SE Hawthorne.

They spotted 18-year-old Aiden Rivero, who spotted them and began sprinting.

"We chased them for a few blocks and they gave up over around MLK and Salmon and we were able to take them into custody," Glatkowski said.

Police inventoried his backpack and found numerous cans of spray paint, spray nozzles and markers. Glatkowski then documented every tag in the "bombing run" where the Beaverton teen was spotted.

"A 'bombing run,'" he explained, " is where you go out and you just spam as many tags as you can in a short period of time."

In this instance, it spanned about a dozen blocks along Hawthorne.

"This is a good example of the starting point of some of our more intensive investigations. Patrol will get a call, they'll respond to it, hopefully they'll catch somebody in the act and make an arrest, and if they do, they're forwarding that information to me and on the neighborhood response team and my partners. We will then start a deeper investigation on that person."

After this, he headed to a notorious graffit area within the I-84/I-5 interchange. Glatkowski noticed a "story" among the tags.

"A tag is communication," he said. "The tagger is saying something to their friends, their peers or their rivals."

A wall like the ones in the interchange is often overtaken by a group of graffiti writers that work together. A bunch of names in a tag is known as a "roll call that's letting people know that they're all a part of what crew that is."

Police will study the taggers' distinctive styles and build a record of their vandalism. Most graffiti happens overnight, which makes catching prolific taggers in the act difficult.

Beyond that, Kirby said, a one-time catch is a misdemeanor, just a slap on the wrist.

Instead, officer take an investigative approach, methodically documenting a graffiti writer's repeat tags across the city to upgrade the charge to a felony.

"We're able to take a case to the DA's office with 20 or 30 or 40 or occasionally 70 tags to our partners at the district attorney's office, especially in the Strategic Prosecution and Services unit," Glatkowski said. "They take those cases and they run with them."

Stats

Between July 2023 and June 2024, the Graffiti Abatement Program:

• Removed over 6,000 instances of graffiti reported by the public.
• Removed over 440,000 square feet of graffiti across the city, through city-funded graffiti removal contractors.
• Referred over 700 reports of graffiti to the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
• Referred over 600 reports of graffiti to Portland Parks & Recreation.
• Referred over 250 reports of graffiti to the Oregon Department of Transportation.

'We prosecute these cases'

Deputy DA Keegan Matosich works closely with PPB on busting prolific graffiti writers.

"It shouldn't be tolerated," Matosich said. "That's why we're going forward and making sure that we prosecute these cases."

He recently prosecuted Jerry Mijangos, the most notorious tagger in town, known by his tag KASR. Mijangos was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.

"This is a pretty hefty prison sentence for a property crime. And we want other taggers out there, potential taggers to know that we take this seriously and that we will prosecute these cases," he told KOIN 6 News. "I would be lying if I didn't say that Mr. Mijangos didn't have chances to turn it around. He was already convicted of criminal mischief in the first degree and was on probation at the time that we started seeing him continuing to do graffiti. And so at that point, that's when we had to start to think about, I don't think this person can actually stop. It seems like a compulsion at this point."

Prosecutors are now using a statute to cover previously-convicted graffiti criminals with set prison sentence for any new offenses.

Both prosecutors and police are "focusing on the ones that are at the top, the people that have the hundreds of tags up in the city or causing the most damage to our communities.," Glatkowski said. "I think that method really shows the gravity of what these graffiti vandals are doing. … Many of them are felony cases. We do a search warrant at your house and we arrest you, then I think that that sends a very different message."

He said that message gets across "loud and clear, and they stop. The consequence is just so much more evident."

Matosich said the vandalism hurts businesses in multiple ways.

"Folks have to clean that up. They have to pay for it. Either they have to do the work themselves or they have to pay somebody to clean it up or their insurance premiums go up," the deputy DA said. "But it does have an effect, and we want people to feel like they can contact the police and we will pursue these crimes because we have every intention of doing that."

PPB and the Multnomah County DA's Office have up to 100 prolific taggers that they're currently monitoring and building cases on.

This past February, the Portland City Council passed laws making it easier to compel negligent private property owners to clean graffiti off their buildings. In October, Portland started considering a new ordinance creating a Class A misdemeanor for tagging with a minimum one week in jail plus 50 hours of community service cleaning up graffiti.

It's an enormous amount of investigative work. But the payoff is better for Portland.