Then there's the huge expense of attempted prevention. For example, the Greater Wellington Regional Council spent $3 million recently setting up cameras at suburban train stations specifically to target graffiti vandals.
These have an ongoing monitoring cost of $1.1 million per annum, half of this being met by central government (that's your pocket).
But even that is largely futile. After three months, 300 tagging incidents were recorded but only 10 arrests achieved.
Then there's graffiti on trains which railways say costs an average of $6000 per item to fix.
There's heaps of other non-repair costs, such as the Justice Department's brochures on prevention and similar material from the police and individual councils and, of course, staff salaries for those involved.
The police have also set up special divisions and have forensic analysts expert in graffiti patterns to trace offenders. So it would be no surprise if a full assessment showed the financial cost to the nation is in the order of $50 million a year - and possibly much more.
I say "financial" as there's another much sadder cost, namely the unnecessary heartbreak to victims.
A week ago the New Zealand Herald reported the prosecution of a 25-year-old piece of garbage called Ross James Goode, described as one of Auckland's most prolific taggers and responsible for more than 800 acts of vandalism over the past three years. Their removal has cost ratepayers $26,000.
"Jail time is a clear possibility," Judge Grant Fraser told this Goode swine, but called for a probation report.
"A clear possibility" - that's preposterous. The judge should lock this vermin up for the seven years maximum and not be beguiled by a probation report saying Goode's a bit simple, as the article's accompanying photo plainly indicated.
"Concerned about a jail sentence?" a Herald reporter asked Goode. "Nah," it uttered, which said everything.
Hopefully Goode will go down and, if precedent is any guide, while incarcerated will be subject to some personal pointless vandalism, a deserved taste of its own medicine.
I've mentioned the financial toll but the real cost is much deeper than that. As a nation we place high priority on home ownership and, with that, goes pride of ownership manifesting itself, no matter how humble the abode, in the immense satisfaction of presenting one's property as attractively as possible.
So, too, with our central business districts with their high-rises and public buildings, which collectively symbolise our image of our cities.
Then along slopes the Goode no-hoper with its aerosol can, hell-bent on reducing people's enhancement efforts to tears.
When, a few years ago, a South Auckland victim pursued an offender in the act of disfiguring his neatly painted fence, then caught and attacked him resulting in his death, there was a considerable outpouring of sympathy. Not for the deceased but, instead, for his victim who now found himself before the courts, his life irrevocably harmed by an action he never instigated.
While one has no sympathy for any criminal, what's unique about graffiti is its implicit cruelty.
A bank robber, for example, has a rational motive - namely financial profit. That doesn't justify the offence but does explain it. But there's neither justification nor explanation for graffiti's banality, instead it's a particularly vile act against not just the particular victims but the whole of society, in despoiling individual efforts to achieve a visual outcome from which we all collectively benefit.
Try as I might, I cannot imagine how there can be any satisfaction from this behaviour.
Graffiti vandals by their despicable actions are declaring war on society and deserve no mercy.
Parliament should enact clear and specific severe jail-time penalties, with no lee-way for judges to exercise moderation, failing which we will never stamp out this abomination.
