Don’t Glorify the Taggers

“Leaving Their Mark” (Times Valley Edition, March 10) disturbed and disgusted me. The romantic portrait of graffiti vandals was irresponsible and unprofessional.

The image of shadows cast across a wall and the accompanying photo, and lines such as “rob their school-age innocence like a masked thief in the night,” “As the Saturday sun dipped low like an orange graffiti stain,” “The bewitching hour,” “they eat, sleepy-eyed” and “she is a soldier in what she calls the newest war of the streets” only mythologizes these vandals and their destruction.

I felt I was reading a trashy, third-rate teen novel, not a major newspaper.

Children are dying because of this and you’re putting these kids on a pedestal. Your article was a disgrace and disservice to those who vandalize, the communities they deface, and the lives that have been lost.

SAM LOTTSFELDT

Studio City