Stockton's taggers are sewer rats

This is written at the risk of giving the perpetrators the very attention they seek, but taggers -- they like to think of themselves as artists -- continue to turn Stockton into a sewer.
Of course, with all the crime and money problems this Central Valley city has, the government's efforts in dealing with graffiti seem to fall somewhere between catching jaywalkers and ticketing drivers who make rolling stops.
In reality, the city has an active and aggressive graffiti program, the idea being that you jump on the problem quickly and consistently (information: stocktongov.com/government/departments/police/psGraf.html). You make sure taggers learn that the city has more gallons of paint than they have and that the city has the will to use it.
But because the problem is so pervasive, it often feels like we've given up. A ride along Interstate 5 through Stockton is a case in point. The ongoing $122 million, eight-mile improvement project includes the construction of hundreds of yards of sound walls, but as fast as those walls go up, they are hit by taggers (the accompanying photos were taken Wednesday on northbound I-5 between March and Hammer lanes).
There is an obvious effort to paint over the tagging, but the damage is done. The over-painting rarely matches and sometimes covers up intricate designs built into the masonry. To those in the 130,000 vehicles that use this part of the interstate daily, it must appear that that civic pride isn't a high priority.
It's not just Interstate 5. Drivers southbound on Highway 99 at Farmington Road last Sunday would have seen that taggers had essentially covered a large state traffic sign, blotting out important road information. Cleanup crews reacted quickly and by Wednesday there was little evidence of the tagging.
Graffiti is not new. Decades-old graffiti can be found at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and millennia-old graffiti can be found inside the great pyramids at Giza. That means the problem, like the nincompoops who create it, won't go away. But neither should the effort to stop this vandalism go away.
Still, it would be refreshing to see a few taggers give up their weekends and after school hours cleaning up the messes they've created. There are penalties -- loss of driving privileges, fines, jail and the like -- but since young people are the usual perps, the public really can't tell whether those responsible are being held accountable.
There is a school of thought that holds that what white collar criminals fear most is public humiliation. Not jail. Not fines. Humiliation. Perhaps it's time to try that on taggers, their age notwithstanding.