Visual pollution

Re “Tagging parents?” editorial, May 19

With your “tagging” editorial, you’re looking for the lowest common denominator. The City Council wants to pass a measure to -- get this -- make parents responsible. You support the measure with one hand, and with the other you fumble around looking for the drain plug.

Peer pressure is referenced in your article, but who are the “peers”? Do they have parents? You even factor in the budding sociopath to spare his parents more grief. Well, who taught them?

Habits and ethics are taught or not taught in the home at an early age. It doesn’t matter if you own or rent: It is the parents, all the parents, all of the time.

Craig Petersen

Palmdale

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Applying a lien on a property owner for an illegal act is certainly a remedy worth considering, but for illegal billboards -- which are a form of commercial graffiti -- not in the case of graffiti by minors.

Property owners have an obligation to manage their property consistent with applicable laws, and surely profit from illegal billboards featured on their buildings, whereas parents don’t profit from their kids’ graffiti.

And if an illegal billboard triggers a lien on the offending property, the property benefiting from the illegal act bears the lien; there’s no similar “cause/effect” connection in the council’s “tagging parents” proposal.

Todd Piccus

Venice