Talent?

In my opinion, 99.99% of what comes out of the end of a spray can is worthless, horrible rubbish.  That includes pieces like the three pink and purple creations on this wall.  However, I have to admit that whoever did the recent piece on the far left does have some talent.  It's not bad.  

If it's not their legally, too bad.  It will have to go.

The fig leaf of "acting commercially"

I received the letter below from Penny Sharpe MLC, Parliamentary Secretary for Transport:

When I wrote to our local member, I did not ask that either State Transit of private bus companies spend any money on cleaning bus shelters and bus seats - that makes paragraph 4 a waste of space.  Furthermore, the company I am working for presently has hundreds of outlets around Australia, and some of them get graffiti on them from time to time. The company is utterly ruthless about having it removed immediately - first thing before they open their doors - because they understand it is bad for their corporate image.  I don't see how "acting commercially" can ever be an excuse for failing to remove graffiti.  

I will be interested to see how paragraph 5 works out - the request for State Transit to institute a policy requiring drivers to report bus shelter graffiti.  Will the bus unions play ball?  I doubt it.  

My response is going to be along these lines:

We have a Labor MP in our electorate - Angela D'Amore, and one next door in Balmain - Verity Firth.  Now let's imagine it has come election time, and Verity visits our electorate and notices that someone has been busy drawing Pancho Villa moustaches on every poster of Angela, and writing rude words about the Labor Party.  Will Verity:

A) - do nothing, as it is not her electorate, and therefore not her problem

B) - ring Angela and tell her she has a problem, and that the defacement of her posters is a problem for all Labor candidates as it "contaminates the brand", making them all look bad

C) - try and clean the graffiti off, or failing that, remove the vandalised posters and arrange for replacements to be sent out

I wonder if Penny Sharpe will see the parallels between this and the situation facing Sydney Buses?  Sydney Buses are not responsible for the bus shelters, but a smashed up, defaced bus shelter makes them look bad.  Do they:

A) - do nothing (which is what they do now)

B) - report it

C) - do something about it

I'm not asking for "C".  I'm simply asking for "B".  It will cost them almost nothing - not even a phone call, since most councils have a web based logging system for this sort of thing.

Landlords......

What is it about some landlords? I've dealt with some that are obsessive about the state of their property, going over it with a fine tooth comb at each inspection and immediately engaging tradesmen to fix faults. I even had one that noticed termites as he was walking by one day, and we had a pest controller on our doorstep the day after.

Then there are those that couldn't give a damn. I've heard about two in our area - one owning a residential property and the other a commercial one. Both have become tagging magnets in their respective areas.

Council have cleaned the residential property once, and provided quotes to clean it again when tags reappeared, but the landlord is refusing to come to the party. Knowing what rents are like in our area, and having a rough idea of the cost to remove the graffiti, I estimate that it would cost less than 1/4 of one week's rent to clean up the property, but they are too stingy to cough up even that.

The commercial property is even more bizarre. The tenant, who I have mentioned here before, offered to spend over $10,000 of their own money on applying a graffiti-resistant coating on the outside surfaces. The landlord delayed and procrastinated over giving permission, and when he finally did give approval, he did so on the proviso that the coating be removed at the end of the lease!!!

Madness! The tenant decided that since their lease does not have that long to run, they won't bother with it. I guess they will be moving to cleaner pastures when the lease runs out, and in this market and in that location, they will have a very tough time finding a replacement. You won't find me weeping over that landlord suffering from their own stupidity.

In other news, I wrote to the Director General of the Attorney General's Department this week and submitted my views on how I think the members of their Anti Graffiti Action Team (AGAT) are going. I gave some utilities an A, and recommended that they kick Telstra off for being utterly useless. I've asked for that report to be tabled at the next meeting of AGAT. If they won't release their minutes of meetings to me so that I can see what they are doing, then I'll let them know how I think they are going. Some of them might not like what I have to say, but I can only go on the information that I have to hand - ie, what I see around me.

I also wrote to the RTA, asking whether they report all graffiti on their assets to the Police. Somehow, I doubt that they are at present. When I wrote to the Minister for Energy about Energy Australia, they responded by saying that they would do so from now on - I'm hoping the RTA will take the same tack.

It's been a quiet week for reporting things - the bad weather has been keeping the vandals inside, but it hasn't been bad enough for pot holes to start appearing in roads or for trees and power lines to come down.

What the hell?

I was driving over the Gladesville Bridge last week and I spotted a bloke with a roller painting over a mural on a wall at the approach to the bridge.  The old mural went up late last year, covering a large number of tags.  I was never sure whether that was the act of a couple of brazen "artists", or a legal bit of work.  Well, the old mural has gone, and this has replaced it.

I was never a big fan of that mural, but it was certainly better than this.  

The rest of that stretch of Victoria Road looks like this - tags everywhere.  I think that all the properties that back onto Victoria Road are rentals (no owner would want to live there because of the noise), and I guess the landlords just couldn't give a damn.

Telstra amazes with their turnaround time

I reported a badly vandalised public phone booth to Telstra on Wednesday morning. I drove past it yesterday morning - and it was clean! Amazing - less than 24 hours to remove offensive graffiti. I feel silly for taking 18 days to report it. I won't be so slack next time.

I will give Telstra a qualified thumbs up. It's great that they responded so quickly - now, if they could just get around to cleaning up their vandalised exchange buildings....

A meeting I actually enjoyed

Like many people, I often don't enjoy meetings. It doesn't matter whether the meeting is held in a nice cafe or on a sunny beach - if it is boring, badly run and clearly going nowhere, it's a total waste of my time.

That's not how our first meeting of the Canada Bay CSPC graffiti group went yesterday. We had a good introductory talk, throwing lots of ideas and issues around and then paying a visit to a nearby site. I got a strong feeling that this is not a "fig leaf" group - that is, where you hold meetings to put a fig leaf over a problem, and then do nothing about it. There are no "talkers" in the group - everyone is a "doer".

There's no quick fixes in this game - I'm digging in and preparing for a long slog. We've identified some opportunities, and we've also identified plenty of problems that need to be worked through. It's entirely unglamorous and unspectacular work, yet I can't see how building co-operation between residents, the Police and the Council won't pay off in the long run.

The other nice thing about the meeting is that we are a small group - we can all fit in one car at the moment, which means none of the trauma of running a large gathering.

You know, I am actually looking forward to the next meeting! I must be going mad.

Reporting graffiti to Telstra

I finally got around to reporting graffiti on a phone booth today that I first spotted on 2 May. Even though Telstra staff or a contractor have probably visited that phone during that time to empty out the cash, I doubt anyone has bothered to report it.

A timeline for you:

11:18:30 - Rang 13 22 03 and listened to some interminable messages. Chose option 3.

11:19:00 - spoke to an operator, found that I had gone through to the wrong department. Put on hold.

11:20:40 - operator found the department that I needed to speak to, put me through.

11:21:40 - finally got to where I needed to be, gave them the details. I couldn't give them the phone number as it was unreadable under the spray paint.

11:23:00 - call complete.

Four and a half minutes - not bad. It's taken me 20 minutes in the past to get through to Australia Post, which is why I now only log problems via their web site. I'm still surprised that Telstra only allow you to log faults over the phone. Given that they are also a huge internet company, it seems odd that they don't give you a web based option. I'm sure I could log a problem via the web in less than 4 1/2 minutes, which would make me more likely to get around to reporting it sooner, rather than 18 days later.

Who would vandalise the Salvo's?

I passed a banner this morning promoting the Salvo's appeal this weekend. Some idiots had scrawled three tags on it.

What sort of low life attack the property of an organisation dedicated to helping the less fortunate? Some people really are the lowest of the low.

Systematic followup and tenacity

Most of the organisations that I deal with are pretty good at responding and following up on the matters that I set before them.  They appear to have systems in place that ensure that things aren't forgotten about.  It's office management at its most basic.

Most, but not all.

I had to chase up Carmel Tebbutt's office this week over an email I sent them nearly two months ago.  I got an initial response two weeks after I sent that email, promising follow up action.... then nothing.  They might be working on a response, but I assume nothing.  Two months is a long time to investigate a fairly simple matter.

Carmel Tebbutt is occasionally touted in the press as a possible replacement for the current Premier, Nathan Rees.  Given how slow and useless her office appears to be, I don't rate her that highly on her organisational and management skills compared to her fellow MPs.

As for tenacity, I've been reporting the same old sites all week to the RTA, Australia Post and Energy Australia.  I report the site, they get around to cleaning it, a few weeks later it gets hit again; I report it and the cycle continues.  I continually wonder why I am the one having to do the reporting - particularly with Australia Post.  Their management will wake up one day and realise that they have a problem, and part of the solution is right there in front of them - getting their staff to report graffiti on Australia Post assets as they do their rounds.

I'll have to chase up Council this week about painting RTA utility cabinets with murals to deter graffiti.  That idea seems to have bogged down somewhere in the bureaucracy.  If you don't continually drive these ideas, they go nowhere.

Making government accountable

A common struggle in all countries, whether they are rich or poor is making governments accountable. When I mention what I do to some people, I get a funny reaction - almost as if I am overstepping some unmarked boundary when I ask an MP or a councillor or a government agency or corporation to do something. Some people seem to be terrified of approaching any arm of government and asking that they do their job properly.

I feel no qualms about reporting graffiti to any level of government, or to any government agency. After all, the state government has recently strengthened laws designed to deter graffiti, and it has published numerous policies and statements supporting the rapid removal of graffiti.

In other words, our elected representatives have informed the bureaucracy that they want graffiti removed quickly. The bureaucrats have been given their marching orders, and they are pretty clear and explicit orders if you ask me. All I am doing is applying some encouragement to the bureaucrats to actually follow those orders.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to do this. Bureaucrats would think for themselves, and act without being encouraged with a cattle prod. But we don't live in a perfect world, and we are dealing with imperfect human beings, so there is an ongoing need to monitor what these people are doing and give them the odd smack on the back of the head when they fail to do what they are supposed to do.

No one audits the performance of most government agencies when it comes to tackling graffiti - the Auditor General doesn't seem to have issued any reports on this topic, and it is something that internal auditors aren't interested in. We, the public, are the only people who can currently audit their performance and provide feedback, and this is a vital requirement in making government accountable. It's part of the democratic process, so I am completely unperturbed about getting funny looks from time to time.

Is it the weather?

One of the most frequently hit sites around here has now been without graffiti for over three weeks straight - that must be a new record.

But why is this so?

It could be because the Police have started to actively patrol that area more frequently, and they're stopping and talking to people - a great way to get the message across that an eye is being kept on the place.

It could also be a result of the Council diligently removing the graffiti not long after it goes up - the vandals might simply be over tagging this particular spot, knowing that their tags will have a short life - and where is the fun in that?

The third reason that I can think of is the weather.  In the spot that I am thinking of, teenagers normally gather every Saturday night, get on the booze and then proceed to wreak havoc. However, we've had awful weather every Saturday night for the past month - rain, cold and driving wind.  Those are not the sort of conditions that are conducive to an outdoor party and a bit of vandalism.  The rain has kept them indoors, presumably glued to their Playstations.

As far as I know, no one has ever really looked at whether there is a linkage between certain types of vandalism and the weather.  Graffiti that we see is generally an outdoors pursuit - although there is plenty of it inside abandoned buildings, tunnels and the like.  Who wants to trudge through rain and driving wind at night to drop a few tags on a wall?

I'll be interested to see whether graffiti blossoms once again in this particular spot once spring arrives.  

Is the war with RailCorp finally over?

I have been a bit slack in regard to publishing my incoming mail.  RailCorp sent me this nice letter over two weeks ago, and they appear to have relented and common sense has finally made an appearance.  I now have a contact at RailCorp to call next time the bridge in question needs cleaning.

I also stirred the pot a bit by contacting the MP for Balmain, Verity Firth.  She's written to the Minister for Transport about this bridge on my behalf, so hopefully that will give me a bit more leverage when I ask for the next coat of paint.

Signage SOP

I have finally found someone at Sydney Olympic Park who can get things fixed.  The SOP website is terrible as far as finding out who works there and what they do.  The switchboard is not much better.

It's nice to see that they have seen the light and will install vandal-resistant signage to replace a wrecked sign.  However, I would have preferred it if they had figured that out on their own. Why does it require input from an outsider to fix the bleeding obvious?

Installing graffiti or vandal resistant signage is just one of the many costs of vandalism that the taxpayer has to bear.  It annoys me when people say "It's art".  It's not art if it destroys the function of the object upon which it is sprayed - in this case, a map.  If you can't read the map, you've destroyed it, and money has to be spent fixing or replacing it.

Spot on

A front line social worker in the UK offers a pretty good explanation for why some kids run off the rails.  He describes a much more extreme problem than what we have here, but if we insist on following the same failed policies as the UK, we will eventually get the same results.

That familiar feeling of head repeatedly striking brick wall

I had a call from Sydney Water this morning - they were following up an item that I logged via their web site last week. It concerned a small utility cabinet outside a school.

Try as I might, I couldn't convince the person who rang me that the utility cabinet belonged to them - they couldn't find it on their asset management system. According to their system, the only asset they had in the vicinity was a pipe under the footpath, with nothing on the surface.

I told them I was going to call up Google Streetview, and they said they were already on it. They'd found a cabinet matching my description, but could not confirm that it belonged to them.

Luckily, I had a photo from last year of the cabinet when it was hit previously. I called up my photo, which had a much higher resolution than the blurry Google shot, and could see that it had a brass plaque on it reading "Sydney Water - phone 132 090".

Even then, they were still not convinced that the cabinet was theirs. I had to tell them three times that the plaque had their name and number on it.

I then found another number, which looked like the asset number, and read that to them. At that point, they started to admit that it might belong to Sydney Water. I then read out another plaque stating that it had high voltage inside it - aha! They admitted it was probably feeding a booster pump underground, and in that case, they'd get their contractor onto it.

Finally!

On the positive side, at least they rang me directly as soon as they had a question, rather than just ignoring my report as being "too hard". They also promised to take action as soon as I convinced them that it was their asset.

The only negative I can think of is that without my own photo of the cabinet, I would have been hamstrung.

It just goes to show how "blind" these utilities can be. I would have thought that the answer would be to contact a crew that works in the area and ask them to do a drive-by at their convenience to check it out. If the crew knew the area well, they might say, "Yes, we know that cabinet - and it's not in the system. We've tried several times to get it put into the GIS without result". A bit of internal communication might have eliminated the need to call me at all.

Then again, my experience of these big government utilities is that they are hopeless at talking amongst themselves. Blind as well as mute. If you have something to tell them, get used to the idea of shouting, and shouting repeatedly. It's like trying to tell your deaf old grandmother something.

Cockroaches

I think the best way to view vandals is to compare them to vermin like cockroaches, rats and mice.  Not them personally - just their activities.

As hard as we try, we are never going to eradicate cockroaches, rats and mice.  All we can do is work on keeping their numbers down to a level we can live with.  That means taking preventative measures like laying down baits and spraying the house on a regular basis, as well as swatting any that appear from time to time.  It's a constant, ongoing process, and it requires vigilance and a small degree of effort.

Vandals are the same.  Sadly, they will always be with us.  However, that doesn't mean that we should just live with the results of their dissolute lifestyles.  We should try to reduce the number of active vandals to the lowest level possible (given the finite resources that we have), and also reduce their output as much as possible.  On the flip side, we should also increase the tempo or rate at which their handiwork is removed.

If we have 50 active vandals putting up 10 tags per week each, we have 500 new tags per week in a given area.  If we can reduce the number of active vandals to 25 through pro-active policing and perhaps some useful social work, then that's a good start - it will drop the weekly tagging output to 250.  If we can then limit the active vandals to putting up 5 tags per week, we are down to 125 fresh tags per week.  A reduction in tagging could be brought about through reducing the number of "opportunistic surfaces".  Vandals attack the "low hanging fruit" in most circumstances - the soft targets.  A bit of redesign may be necessary to make targets harder or riskier to hit.  Those measures won't deter the most determined vandal, but they will deter the wimps.

Increasing the rate or tempo of cleaning is all about systems redesign.  If you ask me, Canada Bay Council has a good system for removing graffiti.  I say that purely based upon the results that it produces.  Telstra has a system that sucks, as does Australia Post.  Energy Australia and the RTA are getting better, but they still lag a long way behind Canada Bay.  Canada Bay removes graffiti in 1-2 working days; Energy Australia and the RTA take between 2 weeks and 2 months.  They have to improve their tempo by an order of magnitude.  Telstra on the other hand needs to develop a completely new mindset.

Weekly roundup

Just for kicks, I decided to count all the emails that I've received from the RTA, Sydney Water, Australia Post, RailCorp, Energy Australia and Canada Bay Council - 199 to date.  They are all either automated replies from their online logging systems, or responses to say that they've cleaned up the mess.  I guess that's not bad going.

The pile of correspondence from these same entities is approaching an inch thick as well.  

In some cases, this avalanche of reporting has had a good result.  Energy Australia has certainly improved its response time in regard to cleaning up its kiosks.  Australia Post seems to have woken up and realised that it has a problem.  The RTA is not hesitating to clean up its "problem spots".

RailCorp remains a disaster area though.  They are as intransigent as ever.  This email was forwarded to me this week by my compadre:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

 

Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server.

 

       feedback@staterail.nsw.gov.au

So now you can't even reply to emails sent out by the RailCorp feedback system.  

Have Sydney Water got their poo together?

Sydney Water moves a lot of sewerage, and that movement depends on pumping stations like this one in Concord.  I had a devil of a time getting it cleaned last time it was vandalised - I reported it online on 4 separate occasions, and each time, my report became lost in space - or perhaps clogged in the pipes.  In the end, I had to write to the Managing Director, and she sorted it out quick smart.  Something clogged in the IT channels by the sounds of things.

I'm working on the assumption that they have not gone back to their bad old ways, and my most recent report (number 090503-000027) will produce a quick result this time.

Repairs large and small

I got an email from Council this week about the torn sun shade at the playground in Five Dock Park.  They've decided that it is too far gone to repair it, so they're arranging to have it replaced.

Amazing what a simple email with an attached photo can achieve.

And if no one had bothered to report it?

Next summer, the kids would be frying in the hot sun.

Living in silos

A feature of many government agencies is their silo mentality.  This department over here takes care of a particular thing, and that's it.  That department over there takes care of another thing, and nothing else.  Heaven help the person from department A that dares point out to department B that they need to go and fix problem X - that is a great excuse to kick off a fresh round of inter-departmental warfare and back-biting and the production of reams of bum-covering paperwork.

I got this email from my compadre last night, and it is so true:

A clear example is the lack of co-ordination within a single agency, eg: RTA.

 

Iron Cove Bridge graffiti control is managed by three separate units within RTA who do not co-ordinate their work efforts between each other. The white/black reflective signs are cleaned/replaced by RTA signage section. The girders and abutments are painted by other staff or contractors. Then comes the high-pressure cleaning people who clean-off the concrete railings and concrete-barriers inbetween lanes.

 

All areas had been defaced some six months ago.

 

In that period I have reported graffiti on all the abovementioned 'surfaces' and I know you have done so too, though:

- the reflective signs were replaced about 3 months ago and have since been defaced

- the girders and abutments have been repainted twice in the last six months

- the concrete railings/barriers were finally cleaned-off this week for the first time

 

Hardly a co-ordinated approach within a single agency, let alone trying to co-ordinate between separate organisations.

 

The result is 0 graffiti-free days for the overall bridge structure, yet if they had co-ordinated their efforts, we could have had several months of graffiti-free days.

What my compadre missed is a fourth department - that which visits the bridge twice a day to change the peak hour lane markers.  The people who move the lane markers from one side of the middle lane to the other side drive back and forth across the bridge twice a day.  Have they ever once reported a single tag on the bridge?

I doubt it.  

They just move the lane markers.  Graffiti is somebody else's problem.

That is a mentality that has to change.  

Telstra funeral notices

A number of recent acts of vandalism around Five Dock mention the elusive "Steph".  Some, like this one, seem to point to Steph being dead, whilst others proclaim that Steph is using ice and sexually available.  

Thank goodness for mobile phones.  

This phone box does have some information on it that tells you how to report graffiti, but there is graffiti over the top of part of it making it unreadable.  Telstra employ someone - either an employee or a contractor - to collect cash from this phone on a regular basis.  Does that person bother reporting graffiti when they find it, or they just take the money and run, leaving the graffiti reporting to somebody else?

Trust, but verify

I got an email from the RTA on Thursday to say that this staircase had been cleaned by their contractor.

The contractor had indeed cleaned the underpass nearby, but had completely missed this staircase, which is what I specifically asked them to do.

It may turn out that the staircase is Council property, but if that is the case, has the RTA bothered to tell Council that this needs cleaning?  I have sent these photos back to the RTA and told them that their contractor has missed a spot.

The "art" on this staircase includes "f*#k fagot metro c*nts".  Lovely.  

Don't hold back

The Daily Telegraph has run a story today on a vandal who has been sent to jail by the same magistrate who sentenced Chayane Back earlier this year.  The comments that go with this story are worth a quick read - they are the complete opposite of what Werribee Watch usually gets. 

The Tele has hit a nerve with these stories - our local MP, Angela D'Amore made a comment at the CSPC meeting a few weeks ago that the response she got to the Chayane Back jailing was enormous and overwhelming, and it was all positive (in that the voters have no qualms about locking up vandals, and like to see them caught).

I can't do much about catching them, but I can do something about getting graffiti cleaned up, so I did my usual thing today with reporting graffiti on a few letter boxes to Australia Post and a few traffic light utility cabinets to the RTA.  Every little bit helps.