KEY POINTS:
Something has slipped badly out of alignment when the family of Pihema Edwards, the youth killed, allegedly, because he was tagging fences, can describe him as "just your normal 15-year-old". And when Rob Shields, the graffiti adviser to the Auckland City Council, can say that 85 per cent of taggers "are not bad kids". Normal youths do not spend their time defacing other people's property. Nor is tagging of such insignificance that its perpetrators should get away with being described as "not bad". Yet that sort of tolerant attitude exerts too great a hold over the whole issue of tagging and graffiti, and plays a significant role in sustaining them as an urban blight.
This tolerance exhibits itself also in observations that tagging and graffiti are low-level crimes and, indeed, forms of art. The latter claim is risible; taggers and those who inflict graffiti on the community are neither talented nor productive. The former, while technically correct, pays no heed to the anguish of those who have their fences daubed repeatedly. There should be no idealism attached to what is ugly vandalism. It should be seen for what it is and criticised forcefully by all sectors of the community, including the likes of sporting heroes. Perhaps then, there would be a chance of youngsters recognising that tagging is an exercise reserved for society's losers.
Such an underlying change is essential because it is frustratingly difficult to deter taggers. Painting over the handiwork as soon as possible after it has been put up is effective in terms of eradicating the signature, the means through which taggers hope to gain notoriety and some measure of fame among their peers. To that end, some persistent property owners and overstretched city council anti-graffiti teams devote much time, effort and money. But even if the tagger is dissuaded from a particular location, the problem is merely transferred to another property owner. That is not a solution, as such.
Others have sought more punitive responses, notably in banning the sale of paint spray-cans to those under 18. The problem there is that the majority, who buy and use these spray-cans totally legitimately, would be penalised for the abuse of a small minority. It is an overreaction. Worse, it is unlikely to work. When New York applied stiff controls to spray-cans, taggers simply found more ingenious methods to apply their signature.
Manukau City has sought to impose this sort of ban through legislation. That foundered because the age stipulation is thought to be a breach of the Bill of Rights. The Government will, therefore, take a different tack when its new Stop (Stop Tagging Our Place) strategy is introduced. It talks of some restrictions at the point of sale, increased sentences, greater funding for council and community anti-graffiti programmes, and an increased use of restorative justice. Only the last of these approaches offers any real hope of significant improvement. If taggers have to clean off their daubings in the full glare of the public, and feel the scorn and annoyance, they might just reassess the practice.
There is nothing romantic about an exercise carried out under the cover of darkness or when the attention of the public and property-owner is directed elsewhere. Taggers know enough of the law to recognise they must operate furtively but know nothing of responsibility. How they might feel if their own property was defaced seems not to occur to them. More than anything, they and their daubings should be ridiculed as sad and inadequate. Curbing graffiti is not about spending millions of dollars, bans and harsher punishment. It is about a change of attitude that reaches throughout the community.
