Riding the elevator down from the courtroom in the Criminal Courts Building, Chaka defiantly spray painted his tag on the elevator back wall. After securing his promise to respect the property of others and stop his tagging, the judge released him.
The judge foolishly believed Chaka was just another innocent kid (an adult by this time), expressing himself in a cultural and artistic way. Schools and $3 million by the Department of Public Works removing tags.Įventually, Chaka was arrested and taken before a judge. Additionally $9.5 million are wasted by L.A. The RTD (L.A.’s bus system) spends over $14 million and CALTRANS spends $2.5 million, a year on repairing and removing tagger vandalism. Repairing the vandal’s damage was estimated by the Rapid Transit District and LAPD to cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.Īnd Chaka's tags, as destructive as he was, were just a drop in the bucket. I remember thinking that this was impossible for one person to write his name so many times in so many places from the Santa Monica shoreline to the Inland Empire. Chaka was a 213 “oner” not associated with a tagger crew, but proficient as an army in getting his tag up.Įvery bus, building, alley, and freeway overpass in Los Angeles had Chaka tagged on it in multiple places. In Los Angeles in the 1980s, we had our most famous tagger, a young man who signed his tags “ CHAKA”, which is street slang for drug dealer. TDK could mean Total Dance Kings, The Def Kings, Total Destruction Krew or just Those Dam Kids. SLIME had back up names like SKUM and PUKE. Many crews that formed were difficult to track because they would change their tag or crew names.
Freeway signs, water towers, walls, and empty buildings began to be covered up by competing taggers and their “crews.” The “pieces” they painted became more and more elaborate, and as the open spaces were filled the cleverest styles stood out from the “surfus statik” of the less talented taggers. and into Canada and Mexico.Īcross the Americas, hip-hop kids began to compete for the tagger fame by “Getting up” in the most inaccessible places or the most times. This moving canvas spread the new “tough urban kid opposed to gang banging” life style across the U.S. Tagging busses, subway trains, and railroad cars got the tagging exposed all over the city, and hopefully across the country. So early on, “going to the heavens” or tagging on high rise structures became important. This tagging and “bombing” was most prized when it was the most visible to the most people. These original dancing graffiti artists and street poets were strongly opposed to gang violence. These murals colorfully depicted a New York, or at least an urban skyline. When hip-hop music became popular in New York, kids stood on corners with boom boxes and did pop lock and break dancing moves in front of murals on brick walls or old cardboard boxes.
Does this story sound familiar? That’s because it was depicted in a movie called " TURK #182." PoS tagging is used in natural language processing ( NLP) and natural language understanding ( NLU).So the story has a happy ending because the city did finally grant the firefighter his retirement. Part-of-speech tagging is also referred to as word category disambiguation or grammatical tagging. Other tools that perform PoS tagging include Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger, Tree Tagger, and Microsoft’s POS Tagger. One of the first PoS taggers developed was the E. PoS taggers fall into those that use Stochastic methods, those based on probability and those which are rule-based. PoS taggers categorize terms in PoS types by their relational position in a phrase, relationship with nearby terms and by the word’s definition. Part-of-speech categorization is taught to school-age children in English grammar, where children perform basic PoS tagging as part of their education. These taggers make more complex categories than those defined as basic PoS, with tags such as “noun-plural” or even more complex labels. PoS taggers use algorithms to label terms in text bodies.
Part-of-speech categories include noun, verb, article, adjective, preposition, pronoun, adverb, conjunction and interjection. In the English language, words fall into one of eight or nine parts of speech.
A part-of-speech (PoS) tagger is a software tool that labels words as one of several categories to identify the word's function in a given language.