Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Irregular update

It's been a week of the usual graffiti reporting - a few Council sites, the odd Energy Australia kiosk and some RTA utility boxes.

The good news is that all concerned are increasing the tempo in which they perform cleanups. Energy Australia in particular seems to have greatly reduced the turnaround time between a report being made and paint being applied.

Westpac have also cleaned up their Five Dock branch - that took less than a week from report to action. I haven't checked on the graffiti on the Commonwealth branch, and I keep forgetting to report graffiti on the side of the NAB branch.

It was no surprise to me to see this story on "Police under siege" published in the Daily Telegraph this week:

Police stations have been hit by everything from graffiti to robberies.
Twenty-six have been broken into since July 2007.

That includes our local Five Dock station, which was hit by graffiti in May last year. The thing that disturbed me most is that the Police ignored it for a week, and it was left to me to report it to the manager responsible for maintaining their station. They treated it as somebody else's problem.

If the Police are failing to take quick action to have graffiti removed from their own premises, it makes it so much harder to sell the idea of rapid removal to local businesses and residents. That is frustrating and annoying. Catching vandals is not easy - but cleaning up after them is.

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