Disagreements over Los Angeles' heritage as a street art mecca entered a new and unchartered phase last week when a settlement was reached between the office of city attorney Carmen A. Trutanich and members of a tagging crew called Metro Transit Assassins, or MTA, best known for a 2,000-foot tag they left on the concrete basin of the L.A. River. The settlement comes almost two years after the city attorney filed a civil injunction against MTA that would prohibit the defendants from associating with one another in public or posssessing tagger tools, as well as imposing a 10pm curfew on them — a strategy that had heretofore only been used against violent street gangs, in so-called "gang injunctions."

In their crusade against MTA, the city further invoked California's Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits a business or individuals from profiting from illegal activity. The city claimed that by prohibiting the defendants from using the tools, skills, or notoriety garnered from graffiti vandalism to further their art practice, they would be preventing them from gaining an unfair advantage over fellow artists.

Both strategies worry civil liberties advocates. Peter Bibring, a lawyer for the ACLU, says that enforcing an injunction against a tagging crew violates the right to assembly outlined in the U.S. Constitution and freedom of movement described in the California Constitution. The fact that it has been applied to street gangs in the past, he says, has generally been justified, on the one hand, by the extreme threat posed to public safety, and on the other, by the limited number of city blocks over which the restrictions were imposed.

"Of course, tagging is an issue in Los Angeles," Bibring told ARTINFO. "But it’s pretty clear that tagging is less serious criminal conduct than drive-by shootings and open-air drug markets, and the city was seeking to impose the same kind of restrictions for much less serious conduct." 

Should a "tagging injunction" like this one be imposed in the future, Bibring adds that former street artists might even be prevented from working in the legitimate realm: "You can’t say, 'Because this person committed a crime, they can’t write or speak about it,' and you can’t say, 'because this person vandalized things by painting on them, they can’t paint.'” Bibring cites Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat as examples of artists who used both the skills and the recongition they had developed in the illegal or semi-legal realm to further their careers as legitimate artists. "Limiting somebody’s ability to be compensated for their expression is placing a limitation on expression," he said. "If you can’t make money from something, you’re much less likely to do it."

Last week's agreement has been described by the city attorney's office as a strategic victory. Citing the negative publicity that the latest settlement would bring, supervising assistant city attorney Anne C. Tremblay told ARTINFO that the move had the potential to deter youngsters from practicing illegal art. "We certainly hope that it sends a message to other tagging crews that we won’t necessarily just use the traditional means of arrest and prosecution of individuals," Tremblay said.

Cristian Gheorghiu, a tagger known as "Smear" who Bibring represented in the MTA case, has built a formidable resume as a legitimate artist since his most recent graffiti charge in 2007. Like several of his co-defendants, his practice will not be directly affected by the settlement; to comply, he will only have to perform a few weeks of community service and make restitution payments. Yet he laments the stigma and "psychological damage" the suit will cause. "When I’m creating a work of art," he told ARTINFO, "it would be scrutinized not by art critics but by the state, by the city, by people who don't have anything to do with art, but they have something to say about what I do."