They're tagging the playground now too

Well you have really gone to town on the issue of graffiti. Here are some ideas that might be of use to the debate. What have I experienced? I have lived next to Northall Park in New Lynn for 12 years.
In that time we have had regular graffiti on the walls of the changing sheds in the park and along the wooden fences that form the boundary on two sides of the park.
The council paint it out and the taggers retag.The usual performance! The tagging on the fences has not been too bad-at times even quite attractive.The tags on the changing block however have been pretty terrible. Unfortunately, this year the tagging in and around the park has become far worse.Not only are the usual tags present but the taggers have attacked the children's playground at the Westall Rd.entrance to the park.
Not satisfied with this they have gone on to tag the lamp-posts,the white road edges and the yellow parking stops.I even found a large pink tag on the footpath! What do about this? Well just painting it out and letting them do it again and again is a hopeless approach.I believe we have to live with tagging.It will not go away.
We should accept it as a legitimate 21st Century art form and develop it as such-an art form. I think it should be incorporated with mural painting so that surfaces that are prone to tagging become attractive vibrant places visually.
Murals tend not to be tagged.For instance the delightful murals painted on the green power and Telecom boxes around New Lynn and Avondale have not been defaced.
A large wall sized mural at Fruitvale Primary School facing Northall Park has not been touched since its painting several years ago. This issue was brought up recently in a Time article about how the city of Philadelphia has developed an anti-crime campaign based on the development of murals.The city's rampant graffiti problem was seen as linked to a gang problem.In 1984 the then mayor W.Wilson Goode started a programme whereby an artist-one Jane Golden-worked with street kids to channel their energies into muralmaking.It worked.Today there are over 2,000 murals in place instead of hideous graffiti.(Take note:it did not eliminate graffiti totally!) Why can't we do it here?Why can't the arts department of the Waitakere Council(and other councils)work beside school art teachers and youth workers to teach kids how to combine tagging with mural making?Why can't some of the $650,000 odd dollars spent on trying to eradicate the ineradicable be spent on making the city attrractive? They key is getting the kids on side and letting them have territorial control.Philadelphia only had defacement of the murals on a large scale when the local Latino and black gangs felt they had not been involved in the design and painting of murals. So there....why don't we copy Philadelphia? Let's be postiive instead of negative;let's listen as well as preach and above all else, let's get off the never ending trip of tagging,untagging and retagging ad infinitum. Tim Kaye