Officer Makes Fighting Gangs, Graffiti Top Priority
By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
Graffiti may look like just a blight on the scenery, but it is actually a full of valuable clues, if one knows how to look at it.
“What graffiti is is actually information for other gangs,” said Edgewood police officer Joe Garcia. “It's kind of like a newspaper for the gangs. … If you know how to read it and what you're looking for, (graffiti) will give you a lot of information about who is around.”
In Edgewood, some of the graffiti imitates that of established gangs in other areas, which may be a sign of bad news coming, Garcia said.
Garcia said Edgewood does not show signs of having graffiti like those in New Mexico's metropolitan areas. What it does is send a message, not just to criminals in Albuquerque but to any gang member that might happen by from places like Santa Rosa, Los Lunas, Las Cruces and Belen.
“You've got a lot of kids who don't understand what they're doing,” he said. “They don't understand the gang concept or the gang world.”
Garcia said what happens is, when gang members come to the East Mountains to visit friends or family, they see the markings of known gangs and take the news back home with them.
“We're a major highway, and when you've got graffiti that is being painted on a billboard over somebody's property … that's an invitation and that's something you don't want,” he said.
Garcia has been on gang units while working in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque and has received special gang training. He said finding a solution to the graffiti problem, and all that entails, is his first priority.
“Because of the knowledge that I have, to me, this is the No. 1 thing,” he said.
Of all his training, Garcia said some of the most important lessons he has learned about gangs were learned on-the-job when he worked at the Torrance County Detention Facility, a Corrections Corporation of America prison facility near Estancia.
“That was one of the best schools, I was learning from (gangsters) themselves,” he said.
There he worked as a security threat group officer. His job was to identify the gang activity and gang members and keep the members away from each other.
“I learned to read tattoos and their lingo and gang signs,” he said.
Garcia said he was not the only one being taught in the prison, which can be a kind of finishing school for inexperienced criminals. That's one of the reasons, throughout his career, he has made an effort to help keep young people from being sucked into the culture of crime.
As chief of police in Chama, Garcia did some intervention with at-risk kids.
He said some of the young gang members would come to his house and pray with him, and he even arranged for a bus and took 130 youths to Fenton Lake to go fishing.
Operating on a limited budget, he took an ad out in a local paper for donations of fishing rods people no longer wanted and got donations of hamburger meat and hotdogs from Smith's and Wal-Mart. He even got a bus driver to volunteer his time hauling the kids to the lake.
“A lot had never been fishing before. … We had the time of our lives,” he said.
More recently he said he has been working to establish contact with youths in Edgewood as well as documenting the graffiti.
“For an officer to talk to them, they responded really well,” he said. “They've been surprised. They didn't think that (the police department) knew as much as they did.”
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