Wendy Jasson da Costa
METRO police bust a graffiti gang yesterday after they were caught red-handed spray painting a wall in Durban’s Sydney Road.
The breakthrough was the result of an ongoing operation between the SAPS, metro police and a private investigating company.
Police spokesman Colonel Jay Naicker said the seven men, all in their twenties, were charged with malicious damage to property and spent the night in the Umbilo police cells.
They were expected to appear in the Durban Magistrate’s Court this morning.
Metro police spokesman Senior Superintendent Eugene Msomi said the arrests were part of the ongoing campaign against those who defaced council property.
He said the campaign had initially started with the arrest of people who were against the renaming of municipal streets and who had defaced the new names.
Private investigators Lane and Associates confirmed they had been hired to work on the graffiti campaign.
Yesterday they said their investigator, Alan Alford, was assisting the SAPS and metro police as part of a bigger, ongoing investigation into the phenomenon because of the huge amount of money the muni-cipality had to spend on cleaning up graffiti.
Last year a Durban graf- fiti artist was sentenced to 12 months’ house arrest and a suspended jail term by the city’s magistrate’s court.
Following months of investigations, Glenwood resident Phillip Botha, who used the personal tag “2Kil” on his drawings, was identified as the ringleader of a crew which used the tags “OTC”and “1,2!”.
Botha, the son of a Durban magistrate, was initially charged with about 800 counts of malicious damage to property, but pleaded guilty to one charge and admitted that he had defaced public property on several occasions between April, 2007 and February, 2009.
Remorseful
His lawyer subsequently said that Botha was remorseful and that he had now taken to painting murals at children’s homes and schools.
His lawyer said he was also willing to clean up graffiti on public buildings and to assist authorities in their investigations into other such cases.
At the time municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe labelled the judgment as ground-breaking, saying that while it cost millions to clean up graffiti, it also destroyed people’s property.
The magistrate who presided over Botha’s case said he had a letter from the muni-cipality indicating that it had cost R829 000 to remove graffiti before last year’s soccer World Cup.