You can’t beat a vandal. They own the night in ways you’ll never own your property. Cameras and motion lights are playful challenges, and repairs are just new canvases. In a war of attrition, the vandal always wins, because, even though you go broke, young people will always be angry and bored.

After several years of lost battles and $10,000 in accumulated damages, a Century 21 outlet in Halifax is taking a different tact. Managers approached the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) for help, and the company set up a graffiti contest, inviting two winners to vandalize its walls in grand artistic fashion. It’s a sort of co-opting of crime, and the idea is that vandals will be less likely to destroy something that smacks of their own sensibilities. Suddenly, there is inclusion and common ownership.

A lot of people don’t consider graffiti as property crime, whether it’s sanctioned or not. And yet, notwithstanding the public-space politics of the property-bereft left, it’s still considered vandalism if a cop happens to catch you in the act. And there are plenty of property owners who would agree.

In East Hants, we have all sorts of property crime, not much of which is graffiti related. Here, our vandals get their jags off the midnight cacophonies of smashing glass. And they like to steal: everything from cars to iPods, power tools to cigarette lighters. In last week’s Weekly Press, the RCMP linked all this activity to drug abuse, the idea here being that drugs cost the kind of money you can get if you sell something stolen, and everything else is what happens when you’re young and wasted. A few thrown rocks, a few set fires, and off you go home to blog about it.

A little south of us, in HRM’s District 2, the RCMP takes a different view of things. Speaking to The Laker, which is also written and published out of this Enfield office, the police there said they don’t think the drug trade figures too large in their property crime conundrum. The kids, they said, are bored.

To some, drawing a line between boredom and drug use might seem like splitting hairs. While there’s often a host of reasons that trigger a lasting drug addiction, things like ennui and LSD do fit on a pretty straightforward continuum.

In a place like East Hants, it’s not hard to imagine how bored some of the kids must be. There’s an archetypical young person that small schools and communities have in mind when they design their programs. Kids like team sports. They want to go the library. They wait eagerly, year-round, for the Canada Day parade so they can watch dogs do tricks. Church groups are fun. Dances are cool.

Everyone in a leadership position can learn something from Century 21 in Halifax, just as they can from governments and businesses that have set up similar programs all over North America. Yes, it may seem like young people are at war with you, always smashing your stuff and apparently enjoying it so much. It may seem like they hate you, because a lot of them probably do.

But why not try to meet them on their terms? Why not let them wriggle out of that archetypal straightjacket and help them be who they really want to be? It doesn’t mean setting up giant panes of glass so they can smash them all day long. It doesn’t mean inviting trucks to blow donuts on your front lawn, or letting someone spray-paint genitalia on your front door.

It means seriously asking them what they want, and then seriously getting it for them. It’s not so expensive when you consider the money you could save.

Paul Carlucci