Timothy Kephart decodes messages hidden in plain sight.

The criminal justice specialist’s company, Graffiti Tracker Inc., has been interpreting the meanings in wall scrawls throughout Southern California for the past year. Now he’s branching out to other parts of the country and even to India as he transforms graffiti into a business.

Eighteen cities now use the company’s services. Officials say the intelligence on graffiti helps fight crime.

In the rush to cover graffiti, cities often paint over the information which can be criminal evidence the scrawls could have provided. By photographing the graffiti and sending the image to Kephart’s company, police have a record of who’s claiming territory or who’s threatening to commit a crime. After the photograph, the graffiti can be covered.

“There was all this intelligence being eliminated when cities cleaned up graffiti,” Kephart said. “Graffiti Tracker changes that.”

Eighteen cities have hired Kephart to decipher graffiti since he founded the business in January 2006. He’s in talks with several more.

Graffiti Tracker charges $24,000 to $60,000 per year for its services, Kephart said, depending on the number of photos a city uploads to the system. Most cities he works with fall in the $24,000 to $30,000 range.

Steven Gutierrez, public safety director for the city of Pico Rivera, said that since the city started using Graffiti Tracker in September, police have made 35 arrests and graffiti incidents dropped 15 percent overall because of information in the photographs.

“It’s made a tremendous impact,” Gutierrez said. “We’ve been able to take out the biggest tagger as well as five of the top 10.”

Graffiti Tracker is a Web-based program run out of the company’s headquarters in Long Beach. The process works this way: Police officers, public works employees and parks crews in participating cities get digital cameras equipped with Global Positioning System. When they see graffiti, they photograph it and upload a picture of it into Kephart’s system. A dozen analysts at Graffiti Tracker decode the markings and classify them.

“Before, our system of obtaining intelligence was disjointed and there was a considerable time lag,” said Sgt. Mike Kearney of the gang investigations unit of the Escondido Police Department. “Now, our pictures are analyzed in one or two days instead of a month.”

The system sorts graffiti into five categories, according to their message: “publicity,” “roll call,” “territorial,” “threatening” and “sympathetic.” Publicity and roll call graffiti lists a tagger’s name or a gang name and members. Territorial markings define the areas that gangs claim. Threatening graffiti contains information on future crimes. Sympathetic markings memorialize deceased gang members. Each photo is labeled in a searchable database accessible to any police department enrolled.

“We made it Web-based because we wanted everyone to have access to the same information,” Kephart said. “Law enforcement can work together and search each other’s data.”

Territorial and threatening markings are particularly useful to cities like Escondido that use the system to investigate gang crimes.

“It lets us know where these guys are hanging out,” Kearney said. “When we see a threat, we can adjust our patrols.”

Threatening markings can also be used in legal proceedings.

“If you have a gang member that writes 187 with the name of a rival gang member, it can be used to establish premeditation in court,” Kephart said. (The number 187 is a gang reference to the number in the California criminal code for homicide.)

An example of “territorial” graffiti would be a message with an arrow. “That’s basically them saying ‘this is our hood.’ ”

Kephart began studying graffiti as a part-time job in a grant-funded program while in graduate school at California State University Long Beach. What started as a way to pay tuition became a full-time career and now a business.

“As we developed and studied the graffiti, I started to focus on the law enforcement perspective,” Kephart said.

After he graduated, the city of Carson hired Kephart as a consultant in a graffiti abatement program. He started developing a stand-alone tracking system that categorized graffiti throughout the city. The initial 10-month contract turned into a three-year project and Kephart refined the system as he went.

“The technology took a major leap when GPS digital cameras became available,” Kephart said.

Global positioning technology allowed police authorities to quickly and accurately map the graffiti, which helps them keep track of gang territories. The GPS feature attracted customers.

“Based upon patterns in the map, we can narrow a target from 32 square miles to two blocks,” said Escondido detective Kearney. “Once we know the area, we can go talk to the neighbors and set up cameras.”

The company’s office is in a secure location and the identity of his employees is closely guarded.

“Because of the intelligence they are providing to law enforcement, I take many precautions to protect their safety,” Kephart said. “They are only known by their first name. They’re not cops so they’re not afforded some of the same protections that law enforcement may be given. I can tell you, though, they are all UCLA grads.”

A Graffiti Tracker office is opening this month in Omaha, Neb., and another one in India is slated for the end of the year.

Gang graffiti in India? The Bangalore area in southern India is experiencing a lot of graffiti problems, he said, hence the need for services there.

“We see a need for this throughout the world,” Kephart said.