Last weekend we found our garage door had been tagged with 'MSC' in large letters. There were about a dozen other tags down our street, and a bit of Miss Marpling revealed that the trail started suspiciously close to Rongotai College and then ended suspiciously abruptly by the bus stop heading into town. Hmm!
A casual chat to the police revealed that it was probably the work of a 'youth gang'. After swooning from moral panic, we set to with turpentine and cloth, and the letters are now gone. Close inspection would reveal that paint was missing in a tag-like pattern, but in Rongotai no one does any close inspection.
Apart from the initial annoyance of the property crime itself, we've been amazed at our neighbours for not making any attempt to remove the tags on their fences and garages. I cannot understand this. If you had some moronic moniker grubbily scrawled on your property, wouldn't you want to get rid of it asap? Wouldn't you want to stick it to the taggers by a) reporting it to the police and b) removing their branding to show that it's not worth it? I have several theories: that my neighbours are waiting for the kids to be apprehended to get them to remove the graffiti - if so they'll probably have to leave their property defaced for an age; that some (but surely not all) affected properties are rental, and that either the tenants can't be arsed enough to report it, or (perhaps more likely) the landlords can't be arsed doing anything about it; that they really don't care.
None of these possibilities paint (hoho) my neighbours in a very good light. And if I really cared about the degradation of my neighbourhood I would join the local residents' association. But I won't because I can't be bothered. So I'm part of the problem really, and I suppose a society based on mutual indifference and contempt is entirely conducive to petty youth crime.
This isn't to say that I think it's my *fault* that my garage got tagged, but I could certainly do more (well we all could) if we really wanted to eradicate it.
Posted by stuart at October 29, 2006 5:35 PM