LOUIS PIERARD
Three hearty cheers for Judge Tony Adeane. His decision yesterday in the Hastings District Court to send tagger Ford Randell to jail for 28 days was a much-needed, emphatic message that taggers are a damned and intolerable nuisance.
The sentence was, in fact, the perfect antidote to hare-brained encouragement, from
Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro and others who similarly indulge young criminals, that tagging and graffiti are ``art' or ``culture'. As Judge Adeane said yesterday: ``If it's art, then why aren't the `artists' out doing it in broad daylight?'
As for ``culture', tagging is no more deserving of endorsement or respect than the culture of burglary or of violence. And when advocates, from a comfortable distance, make light of the crimes that directly affect other people (and which fall on Judge Adeane to address) then the cheerleaders of tagging are very much part of the problem.
One wonders whether the effects of the remarks by the Maori Party's Tariana Turia that tagging is ``an alternative point of view' or Dr Kiro's ``graffiti and tagging provide a sense of fellowship' and was ``an expression-based culture' can be measured graphically on Hawke's Bay walls.
While yesterday's sentence has every chance of being more useful discouragement for taggers than the necessary diligence, sweat and expense by the many forced to paint over the leavings of nocturnal vandals, it is only part of the remedy.
Public intolerance of vandalism has to be more useful than the reflexive urge to make the culprits suffer after the event. The best cure for tagging - and an essential corollary to Judge Adeane's contribution - is to raise the stakes that taggers will be caught.
Unceasing vigilance, zero tolerance and a renewed enthusiasm to dob them in (now there is a greater likelihood of meaningful punishment) should combine to make life a lot more unpleasant for vandals. Only then can the rest of us put away our paints, brushes and ladders.
