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.

Those who contact out work are blind

I've seen this sort of thing twice in the last few weeks - contractors for Energy Australia working on improving the electrical distribution system.  In both cases, the contractors were working within spitting distance of a vandalised Energy Australia kiosk.  In this case, the kiosk is right behind the truck in the photo below, and the contractors were sitting around the kiosk having morning tea when I took the photo. 

The sign below explains who they are and what they are up to.

The chances of these contractors reporting the vandalism to Energy Australia are probably somewhere close to zero.  It's not something I would necessarily expect them to do, unless they were specifically asked to do so by Energy Australia.  Assuming that Bastow Civil Constructions has a long term contract with Energy Australia, you might think it reasonable that they have the sort of working relationship where EA would expect Bastow staff to act as their eyes for them - but that does not appear to be the case.  They dig holes and lay cable and leave it at that.

On top of that, I'd assume that from time to time, an Energy Australia manager would visit sites like this to check on the work that Bastow are doing.  I would expect that a manager employed by Energy Australia would care enough to do something about graffiti on an Energy Australia asset - but from what I can gather, I have higher expectations than many.

Contracting out work is something that I have no complaint with.  But in doing so, many organisations have lost direct visibility of how their assets look.  Contractors are "all care and no responsibility" - in this instance, they care about laying their pipes and cables properly, but have no responsibility for ensuring that this asset doesn't make the neighbourhood look like a slum.

Mixed bag from the RTA and Australia Post

I had feedback this week from the RTA and Australia Post on some items that I had reported to them.  The RTA took care of one of them in two weeks and the other in 3 months.  Two weeks is a good result, whilst 3 months is stretching the friendship.

The responses state that the RTA had their contractors remove the graffiti at each site, which might explain the long delay.  If they have to log the job into the RTA system, then arrange for the contractor to provide a quote, then issue a purchase order for the job etc etc, that can result in some pretty serious delays in getting approval to do the work.  Paperwork rarely moves quickly through any government agency.

Perhaps what they need to do is to pre-purchase a block of hours from the contractor.  That allows the local RTA manager to get the work done without having to go through all the usual purchasing system rigmarole.  Let's say the RTA buys 100 hours of time from a painting contractor in advance.  When graffiti is reported, the contractor visits the site and gives an idea of how long they think it will take to paint it over.  They might get approval over the phone on the spot for a small job, allowing it to be done immediately.  

For a bigger job (say something requiring 10 hours or more of labour), the contractor might have to provide their estimate in writing, but they can get the approval back much faster, allowing a very quick turnaround.

As for Australia Post, I have reported a number of vandalised letter boxes around the place via the AusPost website.  I got a response last night saying that they could not process my reports until I gave them my home address.

Firstly, they already have my home address, because I have reported these things before.

Secondly, on the AusPost web form, providing your address is not mandatory.

Thirdly, why on earth do they need my address before they can go about cleaning something that their staff visit every single day?  Surely, if they doubt my report, they can simply ask the postie who has that route to provide some feedback?

Bureaucracy will be the death of us all.

My kind of mural

This mural of an early Rolls Royce has been painted on the back door of a car dealership.  I presume they've had problems with this door being tagged in the past.

Now that's a mural.  If our local "artists" were throwing up pieces of that quality, I wouldn't be complaining at all.

Go forth and multiply

How much good can one person do? A reasonable amount for sure, but there is a limit to the amount of time and effort that one person can put into this game.

I am therefore trying to do something that is usually described as a "community awareness campaign". Normally, these things are dreamed up by a government agency of some sort, and they end up as a series of expensive TV advertisements and a stack of brochures gathering dust. I am taking a different tack - a grass roots tack if you like.

My kids attend a community daycare centre with children from half a dozen other families. Most of these families live in the same neighbourhood as us - we sometimes bump into each other when we take the kids to local parks and playgrounds. Since all our kids are benefiting from these parks and playgrounds, I thought that their parents would be a good group to get on board.

I wrote a one page flyer two weeks ago, printed 10 copies and asked if I could leave it at the daycare centre along with the other materials that are left out for parents to take. I simply asked the other parents to take an active role in reporting any problems that they see in our parks and playgrounds.

We're not forming a Simpson's style vigilant group with pitchforks and flaming torches, or even a Friends of the Park (which Council has in their Strategic Plan, but hasn't done much about) with the aim of conducting regular working bees to clean up sections of a park. It's just a matter of spotting something and then phoning it in to Council - the addition of another dozen sets of eyes. That's all we need.

I'm hoping that a cheap, simple campaign like this will have more "pull" with this group of parents, because it is one parent talking directly to another with a focused message, rather than a distant bureaucracy using the usual shotgun approach with its marketing methods.

Could this be the start of a parent-to-parent viral campaign? Maybe.

On a side note, the "power of one" seems to be having some impact at least. This blog will soon be having its first birthday, although I was doing this sort of stuff on a haphazard basis before I started writing about it. In my opinion, and mine alone, our local area has started looking a lot better in the last few months. We still have graffiti and damage, but there is less of it, and it doesn't stick around for very long. The number of "graffiti free days" is on an upward trajectory.

For a long time, I was plugging away and seeing a few localised results, but no overall improvement. Suddenly, everything seems to be coming together and working in sync and I think we are seeing wholesale improvements in amenity right across the City of Canada Bay.

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"Graffiti free days" - there is a particular spot that I am thinking of that used to have graffiti on it permanently. It was never cleaned off. Then Council started cleaning it every few months - it would have a few days without graffiti, then back it would come. Then Council started cleaning it every Monday - graffiti would return on the following Saturday night, but would only be visible on Sunday before it was removed on Monday. The community was treated to six graffiti free days, rather than the zero they had before.

This site is now entering its third week with no graffiti, and no cleanups required. That may change this weekend if the weather is good (vandals don't work in the rain) and the miscreants return from their school holiday excursions to distant parts of the state - but as of today, we have had 22 graffiti free days at this site. If it gets hit this Saturday, it will have had 27 graffiti free days, then one with graffiti, then the "graffiti free" clock will start running again. I'm not sure if the constant cleaning has worn the little sods down and discouraged them, or if its the bad weather that has kept them indoors - but whatever the cause, the results have been good.

One small step for man....

As the Chinese supposedly say, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step".

In the middle of 2008, I started to wonder whether government authorities like EnergyAustralia were reporting graffiti on their property to the Police.  As time went by, it became pretty obvious that the answer was no.  

From my haphazard observations, an awful lot of the graffiti that mars our public spaces is scrawled on government assets.  Most agencies have some sort of system to get it removed, but unless it is reported, the statistics will never truly reflect the amount of damage being done, and the effort required to clean it up.  

A good statistical picture also allows someone with the right training to discern patterns and to target resources to where they can do the most good.  At present, most of the statistics on graffiti in this area are based around Council property, because the Council reports everything - but that skews the picture.  You can have areas that have little or no Council property, but are utterly blighted by graffiti, yet they will not show up in the statistics as problem areas because nothing has been reported.

I wrote to the Minister for Energy last month and got this response today in regard to EnergyAustralia.

Good.  It's a small step, and more need to be taken, but a small step is better than none.  Now for the next ones.........