Brian Rudman: A cold remedy for our $5m graffiti bill

Oh dear, how unsurprising. The half-hearted anti-tagging legislation our MPs passed in a flurry of pre-election "get tough on crime" posturing last year doesn't seem to have worked.

Otherwise, why would the South Auckland town of Papakura have been forced to go shopping for noise-emitting anti-vandal weapons to protect local schools and stadiums?

Seems they've bought a job lot of noise-emitting devices similar to the mail-order anti-rodent devices that are promoted as keeping your ceiling free of the patter of little feet.

The man-sized device broadcasts an awful noise over a 30m to 40m radius at a frequency which apparently drives those under 25 crazy. Anyone older is protected from the excruciating high-frequency sound because, by then, one's hearing is deteriorating.

The device was tested in a service lane once prone to tagging and during the experiment it was hit only twice in two months, both times in a minor way.

The firm selling the noise weapon also markets the machine recently promoted as dousing fleeing bank robbers with an unwashable dye. If I was an "eye for an eye" sort of guy, I'd be tempted to suggest that such a weapon, suitably full of some stinking dye, could be just the ticket for marauding graffiti vandals as well.

It would certainly be better than a machine which afflicts the urban environment with more extraneous noise. After all, not everyone under 25 in its 40m range is will be a a tagger.

There is also the possibility that the recidivist graffiti-ist is not necessarily stupid, and will get himself some earplugs or, better, some of those noise-cancelling earphones that can block out the sound of a jumbo jet.

An alternative would be the preventive tactic Waitakere City Mayor Bob Harvey employed in the public spaces linking his city's headquarters with the new train station a couple of years back. He saturated the space, 24 hours a day, with Vivaldi musak. The mayor had read of overseas success in using classical music to drive away young hoons and he told me yesterday it has been a great success from day one.

They started with Vivaldi and have since diversified. "We put in Kiri Te Kanawa. She's always doing a night screech and that works wonders. They flee. And if we see anyone coming near with a spray can we turn up Mantovani, that works straight away." He admits that Mantovani tends to drive everyone away, graffiti vandal and innocent passenger alike.

One unexpected side-effect is that "it sterilises them too. The birthrate has dropped alarmingly in Waitakere City since we started this ..."

An alternative could be the Los Angeles FlashCam, similar to roadside speed cameras, which is triggered by nocturnal movement, snapping a picture of the intruder and warning loudly, "Stop, you are in a secured area, the police are on the way."

Of course all the above are cases of trying to stop the horse once it's escaped the stable. As I argued last year, a simpler solution would be to get real and ban spray cans all together.

No one seems to have added up the millions of dollars local councils are forced to spend each year cleaning up after these vandals. The bill for ratepayer across the Auckland region alone is $5 million a year.

In New South Wales, the annual estimated clean-up bill is $100 million. They tried the partial ban that Labour and National combined to support last year, and it has failed.

Law changes last year made it an offence to sell spraycans of paint to under-18s and required shopkeepers to keep cans in locked cabinets or in a secure area to prevent shoplifting. Adults can be prosecuted for knowingly supplying a can to a minor knowing it is to be used for tagging.

But obviously the under-18s are getting around these restrictions, or the taggers have become older.

Short of banning the spray cans, I guess we could use the same argument the Government is using for coming down hard on cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine.

Restrict the product to registered retailers who have to check and record the particulars of each purchaser. That, at least, would slow the vandals down. To say nothing of protecting the innocent from Mantovani ...