Graffiti is the single most destructive property crime in southern Nevada right now. The problem is so widespread, Metro has a new program assigned specifically to stop taggers. They're called the TNT Team, which stands for Targeting Neighborhood Graffiti. They took the Crime Tracker 3 team along to show you what they do.
Officers Jimmy Rogan and Ryan Jeager make up the TNT team. Their job is to target neighborhood taggers.
"Part of what we do is we go out and document everything in the area by photograph and we log it into a data-base and we have about 200 pictures and we catergorize them by tag."
Rogan and Jeager spend a lot of time in the northeast part of Las Vegas, where they see the highest concentration of graffiti.
"The people who are tagging in the northeast are tagging all over the valley."
All over the valley and all over businesses or anything else that has room for the taggers' names.
"They find it a pleasure to go out and paint and destroy people's property and think that it's cool because they get recognition from it".
Most of the taggers belong to tagger crews. It's similar to a gang, in that each crew has a specific name and dresses a certain way. But tagger crews fight their battles with paint on walls, not with guns on the streets.
"These guys are marking their turf too but their biggest thing is they want everyone to see what they are doing."
Clark County spent $28,000 covering up graffiti last year and it's costing local businesses as well.
Tony Lepore owns Angelina's Pizzeria. He says he had to add a picture to the front window of his business to cover glass that had been etched with acid and has spent hundreds of dollars on paint to cover the graffiti.
Because of it's popularity with vandals, this pizza shop is one of the routine stops the TNT team makes every week. Since every tagger paints his or her own name, it's not hard to figure out what damage each graffiti-vandal has caused to the city. The officers just go to their database and pull up all the pictures to use in the prosecution process.
