SIMI VALLEY : Letter Carriers to Aid in War on Graffiti

Seeking allies for their war on graffiti, Simi Valley police announced Wednesday that they have drafted a new set of public servants who know the battleground intimately--U. S. Postal Service letter carriers.

Simi Valley’s 107 letter carriers will be specially trained in police graffiti-identification procedures, armed with index cards and dispatched on their rounds with an additional mission--to report wall-scrawlings to police.

Police will then forward the cards to the city’s Public Works Department, which tries to paint over the offending vandalism within 24 hours, Mayor Greg Stratton said.

“They’ll be the eyes and ears of the city and, in a rapid manner, they’ll be getting these (graffiti incidents) identified and reported,” Stratton said.

Police modeled the alliance on a similar plan in use in Lakewood, Colo., Lt. Tony Harper said. “We have a real effective reporting system right now . . . but we have the opportunity to stay on top of it and not let it get out of control in this city,” he said.

While graffiti incidents have declined this year after a sharp increase last year, they remain a persistent problem in Simi Valley, records show.

There were 436 incidents of gang graffiti and 2,852 incidents of tagger graffiti reported in the first nine months of 1993, records show. The number dropped slightly in the same period this year, with 277 gang graffiti incidents and 2,790 tagger incidents reported.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, as the post office creed goes.

And filling out the cards should delay letter carriers only a few minutes per day, Simi Valley Postmaster Russ Adams said.

Carriers will report graffiti “strictly on a voluntary basis, but the response has been very positive,” he said. “They work in a very clean, safe city right now and they want it to continue that way.”