Photo / Brett Phibbs

Photo / Brett Phibbs

Does graffiti cause murder? The question hangs heavy in the air of Southview Place, Manurewa, in Auckland's Manukau City where, last Saturday night, a 15-year-old lay dead in a driveway, his shirt soaked in blood from a stab wound. Pihema Clifford Cameron was killed, allegedly, because he was tagging fences.

The day after the fatal stabbing, Mayor Len Brown was more concerned about the defacement than the death: "Tagging is a starting point for a lot of youngsters getting on to the criminal treadmill. Graffiti in our city is an issue we absolutely want to get on top of." He didn't even mention the 50-year-old businessman, Bruce William Emery, charged with murder.

Brown wasn't alone in his apparent lack of compassion for the victim. Letters to this newspaper seemed callous: "I personally have absolutely no sympathy for the tagger!" And: "The tagger wasn't murdered. He was killed. The word murder should be used to define only an innocent person's death at the hands of someone else."

Christchurch City councillor Barry Corbett jumped into the fray, saying the alleged murderer should be set free. "If I was on the jury, I'd let him get away with it, but that's just me."

Perhaps it's the summer heat. But the inflammatory comments raise disturbing questions. Such as whether the taking of human life can be excused because someone defaces a fence. Or why graffiti makes some people so angry they justify killing. Doubts must also be raised about the causal claim Brown and others make - that "zero tolerance" of graffiti reduces crime.

The circumstances of this death indicate the opposite. That local government zeal to rid neighbourhoods of graffiti may have created an environment of moral outrage that condones taking the law into our own hands. That zero tolerance towards tagging is a PR exercise gone horribly wrong. The removal of scribble from our neighbourhoods was supposed to make them safer. But at what cost?

The PR is good. It has transformed so called "quality-of-life offences" from mere nuisances or annoyances into conduct so harmful that it warrants uncompromising, expensive police and local government intervention. We are left in no doubt that tagging's disorderly display contributes to serious crimes. The writing is on the wall. Disorder sprayed from a can - on fences, bridges, trees, lampposts and just about any other clean surface available - is a gateway to mayhem.

The idea that crime is spawned from disorder comes from the "Broken Windows" theory espoused in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article. It began: "Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside ... "