Man ‘graffiti’ has been in the news again a lot lately. At least it’s not at the level of shark hysteria of a couple of weeks ago, and the youth crime hysteria that we’re in the grip of right now. Mainstream media love a beat up but there is serious shit wrong all the same.
However the idea of graffiti as a gateway crime to a life of it, (as Mayor of Manukau Len Brown said) is akin to calling herb a gateway drug to junkyism. Stoopid.
“Tagging is a starting point for a lot of youngsters getting on to the criminal treadmill. Graffiti in our city is an issue we absolutely want to get on top of,”
Tagging was definitely the gateway crime for Bruce William Emery, the 50 year old business man charged with the murder of 15-year-old Pihema Clifford Cameron.
I feel for this guy his life screwed after a brain explosion, but not as much as I feel for the family of the victim. It’s probably best summed up by Fiasko in this forum on hiphopnz.com,
” tagger killed in manurewa ” what a shame his whole life comes down to being called a “tagger”, im glad to see he meant more than that to his family.
and what a shame a man makes it to 50, probably worked hard to build up that little business for himself, probably understood the real meaning of ” rewa hard “.
then goes and stabs a 15 y/o “child” for “tagging”. congratulations mate you really helped out your community, a real hero. the fences are now safe from the delinquent youth .
……..meanwhile girls as young as 13 are working as prostitutes, involved with gangs . p is rife through the community, some poor wife is getting “the bash” as i type .
but at least we got him at “the starting point” before he “jumped on the criminal treadmill”. aint that right lord mayor of Manukua city, Mr Brown.
so concerned with fences, i think we forget whats behind them
rest in peace Pihema Clifford “
I can understand blind rage, but to this extent it’s pretty appalling.
The truly fucked thing however is this guy, Barry Corbett. You take the honour of being fuckhead of the year to date and looking pretty hard to beat with this comment,
“If I was on the jury, I would let him get away with it, but that is just me,”
Graffiti is a problem because most people think it’s poor, violent, brown people trawling their streets tagging fences, and with this perception it’s ok to call for them to be strung up naked and lashed with a cane (seriously just listen to talkback). They are scared of the thugs.
The truth is graffiti in your neighbourhood is made by people from your neighbourhood, if there’s tagging in Epsom it’s by kids from Epsom. A large number of taggers are middle and middle to upper class white kids whose parents are probably congratulating John Key on planning to install boot camps for all those little buggers, all the while giving their kids allowances to go buy montanas with. The truth is graffiti is to now what skateboarding was to the 90’s, the cool thing to do. In every school there are bunches of kids who smoke, spit and generally test their teenage spirit with anti-social activity, where once you’d just steal your parents liqour and get drunk, now you do that and then go tagging. It is not so much a subcultural activity as it is another cultural activity of teenagers like pashing and poking is.
So when people publicly state things like,
“What I’m wanting is a 95 to 98 per cent eradication of graffiti in our community.”
As (again) Manukau City Mayor Len Brown did in this article, then they are basically taking on popular culture. And frankly they don’t stand a shit show in achieving it. Seriously, the Auckland City Council have had a zero tolerance policy on graffiti for how long? And have the motorways even been more thrashed?? Better they just let it ride it’s popular wave out of here and give the $1.3 mill they spend every year on removal to writers to properly paint the walls. That $1.3 mill meanwhile goes to raqueteers who charge $25 per square meter of badly matched paint!?
Beyond the stabbings, beef, po-po, youth gangs, and all the bullshit…….
