One of the problem areas that the CCID Urban Management department highlighted during its recently concluded “It’s time to come clean” campaign is graffiti tagging. However, despite the spotlight being cast on this issue, incidents of tagging continue to soar in the Central City, with the cleaning costs hitting the pockets of CCID levy payers hard.
Says Richard Beesley, manager of CCID Urban Management: “Ideally, we would like to declare the CBD a graffiti-free zone. However, every month we are bombarded with incidents of illegal tagging. It has gotten so bad that we have had to put in place an extra shift so that our graffiti removal team can keep up with incidents as we strive to provide a clean, attractive and risk-reduced urban environment in the CBD for all to enjoy.
“This, in turn, has increased our costs dramatically. The chemicals that we use are expensive and the process of removing tags is not an easy one and takes our cleaning team many hours that could be spent doing more productive work for Central City stakeholders.
“A lot of other factors must also be taken into account. For example, the cleaning of tags isn’t a task that just anyone can do; our graffiti removal team undergoes intensive training to ensure they are skilled enough to remove the tags without damaging the area onto which these have been sprayed. The team deals with a wide range of surfaces such as paving, metal surfaces, granite and of course both painted and facebrick walls, and with some of these, graffiti is very difficult to remove. So, you can just imagine the strain on our resources especially now that we have implemented the extra shift.”
The CCID’s graffiti removal team is put together via partner NGO Straatwerk and consists of seven members. At present, and as a result of increased incidents, the graffiti removal team is deployed in the Central City three times a week. According to Richard: “For the month of May alone, the material and labour costs for removing graffiti tagging amounted to R10 115 and for the period from 1 February to 30 April 2018, the graffiti removal team removed 304 incidents of tagging in the CBD. And the biggest challenge is that these incidents are committed at night which makes it difficult to catch the culprits who are very sneaky when executing this type of crime.”
Richard further explains that the graffiti removal team has been part of CCID Urban Management for around seven years: “The level of expertise we’ve achieved in this field is significant. We’ve developed special techniques and our teams have learnt to do everything, from mixing paint colours to working with different solvents on different surfaces and these skills are passed on to other members of the team so that there’s continuity.”
He adds that while these skills are ones of which to be very proud: “As the Urban Management team, we really want our CBD to be free of tagging and would much rather have these resources going into other priority areas. We would also like to urge members of the public to assist us by reporting offenders to our 24-hour control centre number (082 415 7127).
“We can’t do it alone and through continuously delivering our ‘It’s time to come clean’ message we hope that everyone will exercise a sense of decency and civic pride when it comes to the spaces they occupy in an area like the Central City or anywhere else.”
Images by CCID precinct manager, Carlisle Marankey