LAGG MEDIA posted on May 09, 2009 12:04
THE hardline magistrate who jailed a first-time offender has stepped up his campaign against Sydney's graffiti "epidemic", imprisoning a serial tagger for up to one year. To the RailCorp staff who spent $13,000 cleaning Matthew Sale's mess off trains he was known by his tag "Musk", according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.
But to magistrate Ian McRae, Sale was "destroying the community'' with "perhaps the most prolific crime which is committed every day in NSW''.
"The facts of this case are disturbing in the extreme,'' he said, describing the attacks as "akin to some form of paramilitary operation,'' Mr McRae told Mt Druitt Local Court in sentencing. He was the magistrate who jailed 18-year-old Chayane Back for three months for writing her name on a cafe wall in February.
The sentence was later overturned by a District Court judge who said Mr McRae was "clearly in error''. But yesterday he continued his crusade against a crime he said had reached "epidemic proportions''. Sale, 18, was jailed after pleading guilty to 14 offences involving graffitying trains in Western Sydney on at least five occasions between January 11 and 26.
The charges included malicious damage, hiding his face with a shirt, stealing train keys, and jamming - or "tripping'' - signal boxes with rocks to stop trains so he could vandalise them. Sale was arrested on February 5 after a search warrant found laptops belonging to Sale's accomplices - also charged - contained video footage of the crimes taken by the perpetrators.
"One only has to ride on the rail corridor from Penrith to Central to experience the enormity of the problem," Mr McRae said. "It's a rarity to step on a train which hasn't been graffitied on the outside or inside. "The community is sick to death of this sort of behaviour. It causes great dislocation ... at the cost of law-abiding citizens.''
Giving evidence earlier, Senior Constable Moray Ibrahim, of the police taskforce on train vandalism, said the problem cost $15 million a year.