Specialty unit. The iplt is really big. There are probably people in this room saying i got graffiti when somebody else wanted it, and thats hard. And theres people like me and the officers i have hired into my units that just love the job and see the value in it, see the value for the community. So youve got to have that interest or else, again, you are going to have not as successful an officer. Now you found the officer, you got him figured out, i talk a lot about officers but the same applies to civilians, anybody sitting out in this audience. Because my concept is anybody can be a graffiti expert and a lot of that comes down to training. Where do you find this training . First its police officers, we get a lot of it through approved training classes, things certified by the state, postclasses and thats fairly consistent in a lot of states that have a group that authorizes what kind of training the officer gets. Articles and books, thats fairly selfexplanatory. And really you wind up in the next group, which is the internet. Theres so much stuff on the internet, if you are curious about anything having to do with graffiti, start googling graffiti stuff. If you get on you tube, put down tag crews fighting, thats not just battling with paint, thats physically fighting with altercations. The thing about the internet, sometimes people will ignore some of the major graffiti sites because were out here to fight graffiti, why do we want to go to a graffiti site. A lot of these guys when they have dedicated graffiti sites like art inaudible you can read all kinds of articles written by taggers for taggers trying to train other people to be better vandals. So dont ignore the fact theres stuff out there for the graffiti vandal because that can be of huge use to you. Meetings, we hold a monthly Task Force Meeting and our Task Force Meeting pretty much covers everything from Santa Barbara down to san diego is our main group we have a Task Force Meeting with. We share ideas, its evolved over the years, become more formal. Now each time we have a meeting we try to do some new training or talk about the technology available, i will talk about the technology in my class this afternoon. Its really good because we document it because when you go to court, you can show training on a monthly basis. Conferences, i cant tell you how excited i am these are happening. Only in the last two or three years have these Major Conferences come about. The one up in canada, they were a great group of conferences and other people started to pick up on this. When i became an officer dealing with gravanis in 1991, there were no conferences and there was virtually no interest. As dr. Spicer mentioned, every time it got good, i foupld myself out of a job. I was out of a job for about 6 months because it fell apart and then came back together. Mer and more cities are realizing gravanis is a pattern crime and as dr. Spicer pointed out, its a great way crime to many other activities. So you can wind up precluding with a lot of other stuff by dealing with them when they are down to the part doing gravanis damage before they escalate to a more Violent Crime or serious crime. Its nice to attend different trainings. This one here is great because we have people from all over the country, canada and the united kingdom. There are things you are going to listen to when you go, yeah, i would never do that or couldnt do that because of the laws in my political jurisdiction or whatever, we are not allowed to do that. Then theres going to be other things when you think, gosh, i never thought about that, i think that would work really good. Im going to take it back it my jurisdiction. Probably over the past few years ive got 500 people ive dealt with, officers that have come to the class and subsequently become gravanis experts and set up programs. Almost every program is different. A lot of the basis is the same, the information is consistent worldwide but people will tweak what information they are going to use and how they are going to be allowed to operate. Some are in plain cars, some in marked units, it all depends how its going to go. Take the information you get, theres so much good information here today and tomorrow, take the information you want, take it back and integrate it into however you are going to work your program. When we come right down to it, its not important what you know, its what you can prove in court. Probably every officer sitting in this room can say i have an investigation or we did an investigation where we did the investigation, i know the guy was dirty, i know he did the crime, you send it to the da and the da says you do not have enough to prove it in court. In my career i had numerous people i believed did homicides that we could not take to court because we did not have enough provable evidence. I think that a lot of lay people underestimate the abilities of Law Enforcement professionals and maybe its because ive been a cop 28 years but i think cops are the most adaptable trainable guys ive ever been around, the quality of people in the police ranks is upb deniablely good. Its good that a lot of people underestimate it because a lot of criminals underestimate us and quite often you will finish a longterm investigation where the crime happened 6 months ago and when you are interviewing the guy and he says, i never thought youd catch me, and they dont. They dont think you will catch them but officers spend the time to do it and again that comes from their training and working with it. As a Law Enforcement officer you are required to come up with expertise in all kinds of disciplines. You come to work as a Patrol Officer and you walk out on the street, first call you get might be to go to a traffic accident. You have to look at the physics, you have it look at the scene and see what happened. You might leave there and go to narcotics activity, leave there and go to child abuse, a shooting, a stabbing, those are all different crimes. When you think about it, thats a Staggering Amount of information the officer has to know and hes going to get grilled in court to make sure he knew that information. Experts are all made, none of them are born. Say an officer goes to traffic, he has a real interest in traffic and hes going to do traffic reconstruction and everything up to fatal accidents. For him to be able to do that, hes got to go out to a scene, he has to look at evidence, he has to be basically a map maker to create a diagram about what occurred, he has to look at the weight of the vehicle, the radial skids, apply the laws of physics and come up with a reasonable explanation about what occurred in that accident. Same thing, a narcotics officer goes in, he comes in cold. Hes going to have to learn things like chemistry because he may walk into an active Methamphetamine Lab because hes going to make a decision how that lab will be shut down and his decision can affect the lives of everyone walking into that scene. Thats quite a bit of a jump to go from a civilian to basically figuring out how you will protect people in a scene like that. So we get to gravanis, theres nothing to gravanis compared to those things. The Biggest Issue with gravanis over the years, when i started in the early 90s is there was very Little Information out there and it was difficult to come up with consistent information. And i have dedicated a huge amount of my career to creating consistent information that we can take into court. This is kind of a good example because i have an hour to speak up here. Anybody who has heard me speak knows an hour is not a whole lot of time for me. But when you good to court, you are going to be in the same situation. When i go to testify in court to take these guys to trial, your time is going to be very limited. In that time, youre going to have to go in there and present simple, understandable concepts as to what is the foundation of your case and you have to go in there and do that to educate the jury and to educate the judge. A lot of these people and the judge have never been in front and had to deal with a gravanis type case. The information should be consistent. You have Defense Attorneys that start going through 2 or 3 our 4 cases and they hear the same thing and they hear somebody professing to be an expert and this guy does not know, it puts a big hole in his expertise right off so we wanted to have something consistent. Now, if you properly present this information, it will easily establish the officer as a credible expert and at that point you can start rendering expert decisions. Trainings that you go to should be set up in such a way that every jurisdiction has an expert. Sometimes you have to piggyback on somebody elses expertise while you learn, but theres no reason that every jurisdiction cant have an expert in gravanis and thats going to come in handy when hes talking to city hall people about allocation of resources, to his department about allocation of resources, when he decides how hes going to set up his program, when he decides how hes going to set up his investigations and how hes going to take them to court. There are experts in here, i know, and i know they know if you have that kind of knowledge and you can confront these guys, a lot of guys will confess because they are just so blown away by the amount of knowledge you have. Again, they underestimate us. So with the limited time i have, im going to present part of the foundation of my expertise that i present in my 8 hour class. If i only have limited time i like to put this out because this allows civilians, it allows officers to understand there are differences in the gravanis culture and you have to understand these differences and be able to articulate them in court if you are going to get prosecution. And by having these trainings that are consistent, it also helps clear up misinformation thats widely reported in the media which can really hurt you in court. For example, this article came out november 2012, theres a homicide in a church in the los angeles area. Big, big story because two Church Members contacted a subject who was, quote, tagging doing gravanis on the church. A subject emerged from a near b if vehicle, shot and killed one church goer and wounded the other one. Big, bold letters it read things like various newspapers read the same thing, taggers shoot two church goers. Tagging suspect shoots church goers. But when you go into the article and read the whole account of the incident, its reported these are gang members and these are gangsters putting up gang gravanis. But when people read this stuff in the paper, thats where they are getting their input. They have never had any training and it starts to blur the line. Whats a tagger, are they all gangsters, do gangsters tag, and sometimes the jury is going to have that in your head when they listen to your case so you need to clear that up so they know exactly where you are coming from when you are doing a case. So over the years we developed 5 types of gravanis. Now there are a lot of ways to categorize gravanis. You might be looking historically and looking at Old School New school stuff, geographically, east coast versus west coast stuff, but this is easy to articulate in court and we can explain exactly what weve got and what we havent got. Were going to talk about each one of these individually. Youve got communicative, youve got hate, you got gang, tagger, arts in there and then i used to just kind of glass off this one called anomaly. I dont consider it one of the five major forms of gravanis for prosecution but its important that its there because it allows you to classify all gravanis in one way or another