The other morning I woke up and went to my front door to check the mail only to discover that the either and Auckland City Council contractor or local good Samaritan had done me the ‘service’ of removing the tags from my front doorway. Now, I felt (very) mildly upset about having a couple of tags in my doorway but I actually felt completely pissed off about them being removed.
Stepping outside I immediately noticed what a shocking job this person had done. The paint had been applied so thickly with a well-used roller that it was textured, meaning I would have to sand it back. It didn’t cover the tag properly, it was shining through and they had dripped paint all over the tiles on the ground. It was the wrong tone of white, the wrong type of paint… The list goes on.
It needs to be said – what Auckland City Council’s Zero-Tolerance policy has become is something less about ‘Getting On With Keeping Our Streets Tidy’ and more about the eradication of ‘Name Based Fame’ (as Rob Shields has referred to it in the media). The determination to remove graffiti comes at the cost of doing that ‘tidily’. It is not uncommon to see badly painted rectangles in a mismatched paint colour for example or even bigger walls buffed with an airless sprayer, perhaps with little regard for the amount of overspray on other nearby surfaces. In my opinion, most graffiti removal does little to improve the environment aesthetically – it only obscures the tags and often it fails to do that successfully.
None the less, this graffiti removal service plays a major role in the council’s Zero Tolerance work flow – The contractors painting out graffiti are the eyes of the council, each equipped with a digital camera so they can document the tags they paint out. Those photos are sorted into the graffiti data base according to the distinguishable names – the collective hours attributed to the removal of each unique name is tallied and from that, the supposed total cost of that individuals damages is ascertained. If said individual is ever caught or identified by the police/council they may be sued for the supposed amount owing in civil costs, like the current case that has been getting a bit of media exposure lately. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10664273
They falsely state that this is the first such incident of the council pursuing civil damages from those that have been caught doing graffiti. They have been doing this actively since 2002.
All of the ‘Groundhog Day’ type media around ‘Auckland’s Graffiti Problem’ and the ‘Millions’ spent on its removal got me wondering how bad is it really? Now I may be completely insane having spent all this time pondering and even going to the extent of trying to do some maths to work out what the actual costs may be. I’m obviously not privy to the actual facts and figures other than what is published on the Internet, so this is speculative at best. What I have sought to do though is offer an alternative outlook on this issue.
Considering one litre of paint covers 15 square metres of surface area – then in theory one ten-litre bucket covers 150 square metres. To be fair, some tags will need two coats to be removed properly, so let’s say that from each ten-litre bucket you get 75 square metres coverage. A ten-litre bucket generally costs between $90.00 – $140.00 retail – for the sake of being balanced in this discussion, let’s say an average of $115.00. So let’s say the average tag is roughly 50cm x 20cm, that means there is around 10 tags to every square metre (of course this varies but this is just an average). $115.00 divided by 75 is $1.53 – divide that by 10 and you have 15.3 cents per tag – that’s with two coats!
According to the article since July 2008 graffiti has been removed from 146,000 sites around Auckland that’s roughly 73,000 tags per year. 73,000 multiplied by 0.153 equals $11,169.00.
That must mean that the annual figures are mostly attributed to labour costs of the graffiti removal? I don’t know what the average city contractor or graffiti removal person gets paid although I have been told it’s around $16.00 per hour. According to a survey of wage rates published in December 2009 it was found that the average hourly wage in NZ is around $25.39 – so lets just use that figure. Now, I’ve watched a city contractor pull up and paint out a tag – it took less than 5 minutes. 5minutes is one 12th of an hour, $25.39 divided by 12 equals $2.11.
If you take that $2.11 and multiply it 73,000 times you get $154,030.00. Take that and add the $11,169.00 from before and you get $165,199.00.
When applying this amount to the current case reported in the news article above, that is $2.26 multiplied 551 times, we end up with an amount of $1246.00 – a far cry from the $33,000.00 the 21 year old has been sued in civil damages. In fact based on my (highly speculative) calculations they are billing this guy for one fifth of the annual total.
Of course this is only one scenario – there are plenty of variables, for instance the use of Graffiti Guard products, which allow paint to be removed with a high-pressure water blaster etc.
Regardless though, would it be fair to say that the raw expense of graffiti removal is not costing ratepayers millions per year but rather the industry and administration around graffiti removal is? Think about it.
- The rental, manning and administration of the 0800 stop tags number.
- Supplying of digital cameras for contractors.
- The cost of set up and maintaining the council database, including the man-hours expended in identifying particular tags and sorting thousands of photos into the appropriate folders
- The salaries of any council staff employed specifically to deal with this issue.
- The hiring of various Private Investigation firms to trail and assist in identifying taggers of interest – most likely a major contributing cost.
- The design and production of ‘educational’ pamphlets and propaganda plus the cost of distribution of those items into schools and other facilities that deal with youth.
- The hiring of ‘Graffiti Education’ officers who work in schools and educational facilities discouraging young people from engaging in graffiti.
Here’s my personal take: Graffiti to me is a huge industry – one that ironically benefits a lot of people other than the graffiti writers themselves. Graffiti is also an incredible leveraging tool in local and national level politics – used to appease voters, because being ‘seen’ removing graffiti is a powerful way to project the impression that things are being done. Anti-graffiti Legislation (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism Bill) has some implications for everyone as more discretionary powers for Police and council were bolstered in 2008 allowing them to profile and prosecute graffiti writers in ways that go against some basic rights. Those caught doing graffiti are often given punishment that is considered ‘making an example’ of them so to deter others from doing similar things. Often this punishment can be disproportionate to the actual level of criminality or maliciousness of the act itself. This is purely due to the emotive nature of the issue and how it is considered by the public, reported on by the media and leveraged by the politicians. Again, graffiti is an industry – one that creates livelihood for a number of people and drives a certain sector of our economy. The war on graffiti isn’t necessarily what it is promoted to be by the council and media because perhaps a city without graffiti isn’t actually in the financial interests of certain parties.
On the issue of graffiti I feel that Auckland lacks a certain maturity in its vision of what constitutes a great city. I’ve been lucky enough to visit some of what I would consider the greatest cities of the world, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Melbourne… Many more cities I haven’t visited yet but in general there are 3 features that make these places truly vibrant in my eyes. They are very multicultural, have a great public transport system and visually they reflect the people that live there – this includes the extent of the graffiti. I realise my world view differs greatly from a vast number of people here in Auckland though. While searching the internet for graffiti related news I stumbled over this remark made on www.bettertransport.org.nz that actually made my stomach churn – it was in a thread dedicated to the subject of graffiti on trains:
Nick R wrote:I really get pissed off by the subhuman degenerates that don’t let people off the train first before barging on themselves. It is obviously due to poor breeding, inferior race, low class, bad upbringing, a lack of a family estabilshed during the marriage of a man and a woman and having godless heathen lesbians in parliament. It’s because we are too soft on crime. The number one problem with the transport system in Auckland is the actions of these criminals.
These hoodlums don’t deserve to be part of society, the openly flaunt societies rules. What losers. They deserve far worse punishment than they currently get. The problem is with these idiots that they never recieved any discipline so they think they can do whatever they like and get away with it. Perhaps its time too bring back burying people up to their necks in an anthill and covering their face in honey? I think most of us have had an absolute gutsful of the non-door-waiters in Auckland and we`re sick of wet bus tickets being handed out to offenders who even if the fines were large wouldn`t or couldn`t pay. Personally I think taking off the leg used to step into the train out of turn would be quite an effective way to “remove” the future threat of repeat offending! Then we can clamp a tracking device round the remaining leg just in case.
If these views are a reflection of what the ‘average kiwi’ thinks then count me out of that group of people. This is almost an entirely different issue but that comment speaks volumes to me about why I fail to identify with the value systems I’m expected to adhere to. The supposed ‘good path’ in life is usually preached at me by people that think like that – whereas every gratifying and positive experience I’ve had, has been gained by meeting people that think fairly similarly to myself about the world. Why is that? I think that’s another blog post.
Taken from ASKEW's BLOG..
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