It's true. Rodney Bowman hung out in a tree, waiting to catch "taggers" who routinely spray-paint graffiti on a wall in his Cabbagetown neighborhood.

But he wants people to know that he's not crazy and that he did it for the right reasons.

"I felt that I owed it to my neighborhood and my community," Bowman, 43, said Friday. "Somebody had to speak up and take action in order to be taken serious."

Bowman was cited with disorderly conduct on June 29 after he sprang from his tree perch and attacked one of two young men who had just started spray-painting the wall, which Bowman and other residents had repainted only the day before. The young men were cited with defacing the wall.

"I didn't think it was too extreme," Bowman said. "Now I do, but then I didn't. But if I sat out there with a lounge chair, they would have never done it. I would never have caught them."

The incident happened at 2:30 a.m., and Bowman said he had been hiding in the tree for "a couple hours" before the taggers showed up.

"It wasn't uncomfortable," he said. "When you know how to sit in a tree, you can actually sleep in a tree."

Graffiti in Cabbagetown has gotten much worse in the past year or so, Bowman said. After residents cleaned up the wall near his house, he knew it would only be a matter of time before graffiti vandals came back.

Cabbagetown has long been known for popular spray-painted murals, such as those in the Krog tunnel, which Bowman said he and many other residents are fine with. It's the practice of tagging one's nickname or gang name that gets Bowman's goat.

"They stuff that they were putting up there was plain lame, ugly and trashy," he said. "It looked awful."

Days after the incident with the taggers, Bowman said he had gotten arrested in connection with an incident involving some other youths and for getting into a physical altercation with a man whom Bowman says he caught breaking into a neighborhood church.

He has pleaded guilty in the case involving the church, getting 40 hours of community service, but the other two haven't been resolved yet.

Now, instead of acting as a neighborhood vigilante, Bowman said he wants to start a neighborhood task force to catch vandals the right way.

"I'm not going to climb no more trees, I rest assured you that," he said. "I'm going to do it the most legal way."