"THAT'S me," the graffiti artist Anek says, pointing to one of the dozen hooded and masked figures swarming across an underground train platform in Berlin.
He is playing a film of his graffiti crew "bombing" the outside of a train, which they paralysed by pulling the emergency brake. Passengers can be seen through the windows, frozen in their seats, until they vanish behind the wall of paint the crew is
applying with military co-ordination. Nobody tries to stop them.
They can expect three to four minutes before the transport police show up. In two and a half, they've covered the whole side of one carriage with "1Up" – the name of their crew – in huge red, black and silver letters. And then, they escape into the night on foot or bicycles.
1Up is one of dozens of crews that have made Berlin the graffiti capital of Europe. Graffiti is everywhere. There were 20,000 reported cases last year, police say, causing property damage of up to 50 million (£40 million).
Berliners are proud of their city's liberal, artistic personality – "poor but sexy" as Klaus Wowereit, the openly gay mayor, dubbed it – and graffiti has always been accepted as part of the package. But public opinion is turning. Last year, a policeman was killed when he stepped into the path of a train at West Berlin's Halensee station while photographing graffiti for evidence. The writers were never caught and the case sparked outrage among Berliners clamouring for greater law and order.
"We need a Giuliani," says Gunnar Schupelius, a columnist at the top-selling BZ tabloid paper, referring to Rudy, the former mayor of New York, whose controversial zero-tolerance approach to petty crimes such as vandalism were credited with cleaning up that city.
In the past few years, Angela Merkel's government has increased the maximum sentence for vandalism from one to two years in prison and made it easier for prosecutors to push for the maximum. There has also been a generational change among judges, reflecting a less forgiving philosophy, according to Peter Brasche, a lawyer who defends graffiti artists and takes canvasses from his young clients as part of his fee. "The older judges are members of the '68 generation," he says. "They want to educate. The younger ones want to sentence. Even ordinary younger people are turning against graffiti. Twenty-year-olds are calling the police when they see someone doing it. That didn't used to happen."
Typically, a first offence might earn a writer a spell of community service or, if they are 21 or over, a fine. By the third offence, they face a suspended jail sentence and, for the fourth, a jail term of two years.
Opponents such as Gunnar Schupelius link graffiti crews to more serious crimes. And while this is true in a few cases, people such as Anek resent the perception that all writers are gangsters, drug users and criminals.
A gentle and slightly hippyish 27-year-old, Anek is studying to be a teacher. He says he loves the silence at 3am when he goes out tagging on his own. "It's like you own the street," he says.
At the other extreme, adrenaline-fuelled raids such as the train "bombing" are all about the kick, the feeling of camaraderie and the sense of belonging he gets by putting himself in danger with his friends. His girlfriend is part of the 1up crew, which happily accepts women.
Anek worries about getting caught and what this might do to his teaching career prospects.
"People can't imagine that someone who is studying or has a job and is respectable also does graffiti," he says.
The police response is gathering pace. A special squad set up in the 1990s has grown to about 20 investigators, who use helicopters and night-vision to catch writers in the dark and have a huge database matching tag names and crews to individuals.
The full article contains 666 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
