VANDALS targeted the picturesque Lake Wendouree district in a graffiti spree on Tuesday night, defacing walls and fences with unsightly tags.
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The Lake Gardens estate walls and Botanical Gardens fences along Gillies Street were hotspots, with some reports that Lake Wendouree surfaces were also defaced, including Steve Moneghetti running track signs.
The City of Ballarat was hot on the heels of taggers, cleaning up each sprayed surface as soon as its offices were open for business on Wednesday morning, completing the job before 11am.
Mayor Des Hudson said the council’s policy was to remove graffiti vandalism within 24-48 hours to prevent vandals enjoying the “notoriety” the act entailed.
He called on the community to phone police whenever they saw suspicious people loitering to ensure authorities could act quickly.
“There were 10 panels (defaced), which is a fairly large scale if you think of how large those panels are – one to two metres. So obviously the people there have been doing it for a couple of minutes. If there were cars going past, it would have been great for that to be called in,” he said.
“The more we tolerate or don’t get involved, unfortunately it has that risk of increasing.”
Ballarat Police Senior Sergeant Peter Carey said taggers would “come and go”, sometimes making it difficult to identify new tags.
He said tag graffiti – which he distinguished from street art – was photographed by police and logged in a database to help build a case against offenders.
He asked residents to use their camera-equipped phones to take pictures of graffiti and report it to police.
“The response from the City of Ballarat from this latest incident is the best way of dealing with it, getting it cleaned as quickly as possible, because that lessens the exposure of the taggers, as that’s what they’re after – the notoriety.”
Ballarat Police met last week with private organisation VandalTrak to discuss using its technology to build cases against offenders and prosecute for up to hundreds of crimes rather than isolated incidents.