Graffiti/tagging: The Singapore Solution

Writing in today's NY Times, Clyde Haberman deplores the recent rash of graffiti on the windows of New York's subway cars ("A Stain on Subways and on the City," NY Times, Jan. 10, 2006):

...Lots of subway cars are being scarred by this new barbarism, which some with sensibilities more refined than ours would have us believe qualifies as an urban art form...The new outrages, confined for now to windows, are done in what looks like white paint. It isn't. It is the kind of etching acid used by artists who work with glass. In the hands of the new Visigoths, the acid is liberally sprayed or brushed onto train windows so that it eats into the glass, impossible to erase.

A transit spokesman tells Haberman that the system can no longer pull the vandalized trains from service until they can be cleaned---the tactic used by the city during earlier epidemics of vandalism---since "This stuff doesn't come off." The transit system now has to leave the trains in service until the window gets so bad you can't see through it; it's then replaced at a cost of $130 per window.

Haberman regrets that there are no immediate solutions to this kind of vandalism, and so do we. But he suggests an idea we floated last year, The Singapore Solution:

A part of us kind of hoped for a Singapore-style response. Singapore has mandatory caning for vandals. Sure, there may be a temporarily sore buttock or two. But graffiti is not a problem there.

Here in Progressive Land, the SF Bay Guardian's political editor, Tim Redmond, is on record as liking graffiti/tagging. And former District 5 Supervisor Matt Gonzalez famously allowed a tagger to deface his office walls in the name of "art." With progressives doing this kind of enabling, it's not surprising that the city spends millions every year dealing with this form of vandalism.