Making graffiti criminals clean up their crimes

The LNP’s stance
The LNP believes that all vandals should be made to clean up graffiti and perform some form of community service as part of their sentence. This is a policy of making graffiti criminals pay for their crimes against the community.

The LNP has a comprehensive strategy to cut down the incidents of graffiti vandalism and to deal with the growing cost to the Queensland community. This action plan consists of long term strategies to deal with the cause and effect of graffiti crime.

The LNP is committed to

• Tough policing to catch graffiti vandals
• A robust responsive sentencing regime for those committing graffiti crime
• A system for rehabilitating offenders, particularly young offenders to stop them committing crime. We don’t need a system like the one we have under Labor where responsibility for ones actions are down played and ignored.

Reasons for this stance
Graffiti accounts for millions of dollars in damage to public and private property each year, but it has a far greater cost on the community. Graffiti erodes the social order and safe environment that we as Queenslanders have come to enjoy and expect.

Graffiti has a negative impact on the urban landscape and as criminologists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling stated in their publication Broken Windows graffiti “in a particular place indicates to the law abiding users of the area that the environment is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests”. The social decay that comes with graffiti gives the impression that offenders are getting away with their vandalism and governments are incapable of maintaining social order.

There were 600 vandals found guilty of graffiti offences in Queensland in 2005-06 and 743 in 2006-07. Of those only 190 and 244 convictions were recorded for the respective periods.

The number of people found guilty of a graffiti offence has significantly increased in the last five years and the stain on public and private property is clearly out of control.