KEY POINTS:
People in Tauranga will be offered thousands of dollars in rewards to dob in taggers.
Tauranga City Council's graffiti action plan includes a reward-based "dob in a tagger" scheme.
It will get $5000 a year from the Ministry of Justice.
The nine-point plan to combat taggers grew out of the city council's insisting that more needed to be done on the ground to combat graffiti. It will not be confirmed until the council signs off its 2008-09 annual plan next month.
Council environmental monitoring manager James Jefferson told councillors this week that police had agreed to take a zero-tolerance approach to tagging by temporarily dropping diversion as an option for those who had no previous criminal record.
The system in which first offenders escape getting a criminal record for lesser crimes will be dropped for six months for taggers and then reviewed.
The biggest weapon in Tauranga's crackdown against taggers will be council spending of $100,000 a year to employ a person whose sole task would be to combat graffiti.
A new tool at the disposal of the graffiti co-ordinator will be a computer-based evidence gathering system called "tagger tracker" which allowed police and courts to see exactly how many tags had been spray-painted by a particular tagger. The job will entail covert surveillance of graffiti hotspots to identify taggers. This work, costing up to $10,000 a year, could be funded by the ministry.
