Recently I watched a television news piece on graffiti artists in Lewiston. The piece opened with a businessman complaining about vandals putting graffiti on the walls of his business. The news piece ended by legitimizing those vandals by calling them “graffiti artists.” I suppose the television station did that to not offend anyone, just in case one of those graffiti artists might actually have some talent.

Now, instead of enforcing the law, the mayor of Lewiston, formally the ex-police chief of Lewiston, would rather give those “talented people” a blank canvas and allow them to legally deface a building. You know, the “If you build it, they will come” mentality.

In the words of Dr. Phil, “Let’s get real people.”

Let’s not legitimize a group of mostly young, wannabe gangsters by calling them artists. If these people were artists, business owners would be paying them to spray paint on the walls of their buildings. No, that would be a mural, and there are plenty of those in L-A.

Let’s make the laws stricter and enforce them. Let’s keep the L-A on the East Coast from looking like the L-A on the West Coast.

Robert Clark, Auburn