Subscribe to RSSCouncil Takes On Prolific Tagger
Auckland City Council has filed a civil action in Auckland District Court against a certain prolific graffiti vandal aged 21 and wants him to cough up $33,000 in damage repair costs.
Last year the same man pleaded guilty to, and was convicted of 21 criminal intentional damage charges relating to graffiti vandalism.
At that time, he was arrested after Auckland City Council’s private investigators supplied information about his offending to Auckland City Police, who executed a search warrant at his residence and located substantial evidence showing he was a prolific graffiti vandalism.
The police sought damage costs of $2,100 from the tagger but the court ordered him to pay only $500 and do community service.
Now the council’s database which records graffiti and matches it against known taggers has captured a further 551 incidents of graffiti vandalism that it says he is responsible for.
Councillor Paul Goldsmith says the civil action is an NZ first to show the council’s intent to hold offenders fully accountable for their actions. The civil court process and the defendant’s response to the action will determine the next steps.
Tagging is all over the rail corridor- here opp.Newmarket platforms
All graffiti is being photographed and entered into the graffiti database to track and identify offenders. The top ten graffiti vandals are regularly targeted using camera surveillance and investigative operations and all evidence is handed to Auckland City Police.
The council says since it introduced a new eradication service in July 2008, graffiti has been removed from over 146,000 sites, and 176 offenders have been apprehended.
The council also continues to work in partnership with local residents, with 778 volunteers helping to keep their communities graffiti free.
6 Comments
Please tell me this is FEiST?
@Jeff You never know your luck!
Good work on this piece Jon, excuse my wording, but i hope this guy get well and truly ass*** by the courts, then get some more action when he goes to Jail or prison.
coming down hard on this one person should hopefully sound out that its not to be tolerated.
man i wish i could see him in prison. so i can laugh my ass of at him.
What can we do about the scratched windows inside our trains (and some buses)?
Good to hear the council is tackling the issue head on. Anybody know what policy Hong Kong is implementing? Whatever they are doing there seems to be no tagging anywhere.
I may just be getting old, grumpy and less liberal, but there are days when Singapore’s “10 hits with the rattan cane for littering and who knows what for tagging” policies seem useful.
But yeah, good on Council to follow this up. $500? Laughable.
500 hours of community service scrubbing tags off would be a good start. No supervising necessary - he’s just given a space to clean up, and if it’s still clean after a week, he gets deducted X hours from his time served. If someone else tags it in the meantime, he gets to clean it up again!