It should have been confronted in the beginning. Now it’s out of hand.

Graffiti was once a rarity in downtown Portland. Now, ignored or tolerated for too long, it has metastasized, spread like a cancer throughout the city.

Graffiti isn’t harmless play-acting or simply entertainment for bored youth. It isn’t simple rebellion either. It is, instead, reckless lunacy.

Unapproved graffiti on a building, train or highway wall is not just a harmless “expression of self,” as some apologists argue.  There’s no romanticism in it. It is abusing others’ property. It’s a crime that impacts the quality of life of everybody who has to confront it. At a minimum, it’s vandalism. When used to mark territory by gangs, it puts the community at risk. If allowed to stay and multiply, it serves as a billboard for disorder and social disruption.

As Whitney Hall has written, graffiti has a “wave effect” in that it leads to increases in crime, including violence, loitering, littering, and other forms of property destruction, as well as more theft of items being used to do the graffiti.

Maybe some graffiti can be seen as art, but that’s not what’s now covering Portland. It is, instead, brutality taking away our right to a clean city, our right to live in a safe unthreatening environment.

When New York City’s grand Frederick Law Olmstead-designed Central Park fell into debilitating despair in the 1970s and 1980s, the proliferation of graffiti was a prime signal of its decline.

The park’s revival was spurred, in part, by aggressive efforts to rid the park of graffiti and meticulously restore it to its former grandeur.

Portland needs to do the same.

ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, recently posted an article written by Jeremy Kohler arguing that the failure of state legislatures and law enforcement to respond to the attacks of armed far-right mobs led directly to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6. “Experts and elected officials said the lack of action by lawmakers and police created an environment that encouraged political violence,” ProPublica wrote. “Eventually, you get to the point of entitlement where you can get away with anything and there will never be any accountability,” the Idaho House minority leader, Ilana Rubel, a Democrat, said.”

It’s time to face Portland’s tolerance for graffiti for what it is, another sign of a city out of control.