Graffiti Foes Paint Town to Keep City Residents From Seeing Red

ANAHEIM — When teen-agers Carlos Alvarez, Wendy Caballero and Marcie Ramirez get together to paint on walls, they do it blatantly and in broad daylight, even though the police sometimes get called.

But they and their friends aren’t putting up graffiti; they are painting over them.

Ten young people, ages 14 to 21, are employed by the Anaheim Beautiful Graffiti Free program, funded by a $15,000 federal grant. The youths, who come from low-income families, earn the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour and will work up to 40 hours a week until Labor Day.

“We need to make the city look better so it will look better than L.A.,” said Wendy, a 15-year-old Anaheim High School student. “L.A.’s all dirty, and we don’t want that here.”

People often honk their car horns and wave when they see the youths painting over graffiti, Ramirez said. But sometimes people mistake the group for taggers and notify the police.

“The police stop all the time and tell us they got a call about us,” she said.

Graffiti are a major problem in Anaheim, said Carolyn Griebe, who runs the city’s anti-graffiti programs. Using donated paint and supplies, the youths are dispatched to 20 to 60 graffiti sites daily.

“If someone’s neighborhood has never had graffiti and all of a sudden it starts popping up, they are going to feel negatively about the city,” Griebe said. “We need to assure them we are doing something.”

Gang members, who paint graffiti to mark their territory, get angry when it is removed. On several occasions, they have threatened the crew, which is supervised by city employee Albert Brady.

“What we have started doing is taking down gang graffiti in the early morning, before the gang members get up,” Brady said. “If you wait until the afternoon, they are wide awake.”