The Western Australian Police’s latest campaign had the community thinking hard about graffiti, but perhaps not in the way authorities had hoped with a cringe-inducing Goodbye Graffiti video series that ended on November 8.
The first ad, released on November 2, which went viral, featured a young couple walking through Leederville, in inner Perth, while on a date. The man shared he was celebrating that he got paid after dobbing in vandals spraypainting a bus stop.
“Saving money on actors to pay rewards, I like it,” one Facebook user commented among thousands of other comments deriding the ad as cringeworthy.
On Wednesday WA Police release “Graffiti 4 – Consequences”, saying: “There’s been a lot of talk about our Goodbye Graffiti videos in recent days… and that’s great! Here’s the final episode in the series, with a reminder that (unlike these videos) graffiti vandalism is a crime.”
The ad series was reminiscent of the infamous Finance Department Ad released earlier in March, which featured stiff dialogue between real-life staff about projects and “paleo pear and banana bread.” As Storyful noted when it was released, the “wooden conversations between the people in the video seem not like genuine banter between co-workers, instead resembling an alien species using dolls to crudely mock humans.”
The WA Police’s other video series, “Damo”, was a bit more well-received. Credit: Western Australia Police Force via Storyful
