Gang Graffiti Problem Persists for Fireside Drive, Park Plaza Co-op

Editor's Note: Graffiti vandalism continues to be a problem in and around Park Plaza Co-op manufactured home park in Fridley, with new incidents reported Thursday. Last week, when the interviews for this articles were conducted, the park's fence along Fireside Drive was the target.

Updated below. Graffiti stretching across a Fridley manufactured home park’s boundary fence is the work of two Twin Cities rival gangs, Sureño 13 and the Vatos Locos, said Natividad Seefeld, the Park Plaza Co-op’s board president.

The markings, which cover the long wooden fence that lines the park along Fireside Drive, include the words “SouthSide,” “Sur 13” and a four-letter word.

“If I can at least get the naughty word off the fence, that’s going to be my main goal at this point,” Seefeld said.

Fridley police .

Seefeld said that in her 17 years as a Park Plaza resident and third year as board president, this is the first gang-related activity she has noticed.

“You have to be worried when it gets this big,” she said. “You’re always worried when gangs hit the area.”

Seefeld said her daughter helped decode the graffiti after a resident brought it to her awareness and she subsequently filed a police report.

Seefeld said that at Fridley Terrace, a mobile home park just west of Highway 65 from Park Plaza, gang-related graffiti has been an ongoing problem

Seefeld said she did not believe any of her residents were members of gangs.

Police Perspective
Gang activity in Fridley is relatively rare, according to Fridley Police Lt. Mike Monsrud.

"We certainly do have some gang members living in Fridley," he said, but they tend to "wreak havoc" in Minneapolis and St. Paul, not Fridley. "They don't like to create a lot of attention to themselves." (Violent gang-related crimes in Fridley are "very rare," he said.)

And exception is occasional tagging—"'marking my territory'" or "'this is my turf'-type thing." Graffiti complaints in Fridley amount to "a few calls a year," Monsrud said; of those, two to four calls end up being "somehow gang related."

Police ask people to report graffiti when they see it. "If you let it go, other groups start tagging over it," he said. On public property, the removal or painting over is done by public workers or people in the criminal justice system who are on work release or in diversion programs—including juveniles who themselves have been caught doing graffiti.

Monsrud said "there are not a whole lot of leads to go on" in the recent incidents, calling the markings "generic." He said Fridley police "know where some of [gang members] are but certainly not all of them." He said he couldn't comment on locations in the city where police suspect gang members live.

Update (2:15 p.m. Friday): Seefeld said Friday morning that the co-op's new sign and homes within the park were defaced Thursday. Fridley Police Capt. Bob Rewitzer confirmed that by email:

We took several reports the week before last concerning graffiti sprayed on fences of Park Plaza as well as Friendly Chevrolet, both along Fireside Drive. We also took a report of graffiti sprayed on a building on Baker Street. Last night (3-15) we took an additional three reports of graffiti occurring in the 1200 block of Onondaga. The graffiti represents the markings of the notorious Surenos 13 and Vatos Locos street gangs. The graffiti does not necessarily mean that we have a street gang in Fridley – it is much more likely we have a tagger that simply wants to “represent” the gang markings. That being said, we take the issue of serial tagging seriously and our staff will actively patrol and pursue leads.