To Protect and to Serve Political Art

When 17-year-old Alice Woelfle-Erskine landed in court for pasting up guerrilla artist Robbie Conal’s political poster lambasting the Rampart police scandal, she found an unlikely ally — in the LAPD.

The two LAPD officers who arrested Woelfle-Erskine in West Los Angeles on April 1 liked Conal’s artwork, a sardonic take on allegations that officers from the LAPD’s Rampart Station beat, framed and even shot innocent people. They liked it a lot. Both asked for copies, and Woelfle-Erskine obliged.

“One of the officers wanted the poster for his home, and the other one wanted his for the office,” said Woelfle-Erskine.

At Woelfle-Erskine’s court date, one of the arresting officers, Steve Carr of the LAPD’s Pacific Division, told L.A. Superior Court Referee and Santa Monica Juvenile Traffic Judge Pamela Davis he was not offended by the poster. As a matter of fact, he had one hanging in his home, Carr said. Davis abruptly dropped a vandalism charge that could have cost Woelfle-Erskine a year’s driving privileges and a stiff fine.

The Santa Monica High School graduate was instead convicted of a curfew violation. And although she has 42 hours of community service ahead of her, Woelfle-Erskine says she would do it all over again. “Posters are a way of showing your art and a good way to express your political beliefs,” she says. “People should know what the LAPD is doing.”

Mar Vista–based Conal, on the other hand, says he will be more cautious about staffing his midnight postering raids.

“When we meet at Canter’s [restaurant] in the middle of the night and I give my guerrilla etiquette, I should ask for ID,” said the nationally known artist, whose sardonic, punning visual takes on local and national issues have become a staple of L.A.’s streets. “It was a shocking learning experience for me.”

So what is the art that caught the fancy of the boys in blue? Conal altered a photograph of an LAPD badge to look like a skull, and framed it with two crossed, burning police batons. The poster’s copy reads, “Dis Belief.” Kind of an outlaw-biker look; just the thing for those LAPD officers who persist in seeing themselves as members of their own gang. (Remember the Vikings, a Sheriff’s-deputy pack in Lennox that a federal judge once declared to be a “neo-Nazi” organization?) Or are some LAPD officers just art lovers? Carr declined to comment. —Christine Pelisek

A Plague on Both Our Houses

There’s been much talk lately — with the exoneration of 13 death-row convicts in Illinois, and Texas’ controversial execution of Gary Graham — of a coming “sea change” in the U.S. electorate’s attitude toward capital punishment. While we at OffBeat are not at all sure about the ever-shifting sands of popular opinion, we have noted a change in position — and some unexpected nonpartisanship — by pundits of both the left and the right.

To wit: cantankerous progressive Christopher Hitchens, who in his June 26 “Minority Report” for The Nation writes about the conservative Weekly Standard staff writer credited with exposing Governor George W. Bush’s callous mockery of a soon-to-be-executed murderer’s pleas for clemency:

“Tucker Carlson . . . told me that in an in-house discussion it emerged that almost all the writers for his [neo-neo-conservative] magazine were [death penalty] abolitionists,” Hitchens says. “But until then, each had thought that he or she was the only one.”

After bemoaning the fact that the majority of recent high-profile expressions of skepticism re the death penalty seem to be coming from — yuck — Republicans (e.g., Illinois Governor George Ryan, New York Governor George Pataki, evangelist Pat Robertson), Hitchens segues into a harsh indictment of Bill Clinton’s record on the issue. Lowlights include Clinton’s supervision of the last-minute photo-op execution, during the 1992 New Hampshire primary, of brain-damaged Alabama convict Rickey Ray Rector, and the draconian Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act the president pushed through Congress in 1996.

“It’s high time,” Hitchens concludes, “that Vice President Gore [were] asked where he stands on this essential and infamous part of his boss’s ‘legacy.’” (Hitchens’ own estimation of the pro-capital-punishment veep’s stance is summed up in his title: “Gore on the Hands.”)

Meanwhile, in the concurrent issue of that biweekly bastion of hard-line conservatism, the National Review, reporter and essayist Carl M. Cannon — who has assisted personally in the exoneration of more than one death-row inmate — presents a strong case for why even death-penalty proponents should review their position on state-sponsored killing.

“If ideology and experience lead one to the conclusion that government is by nature inefficient and inept,” he writes in a carefully worded appeal to conservative instincts and principles, “then why should it be astonishing that the actions of one branch of government — the judicial branch — are so routinely wrong?”

Cannon goes on to recount the reasons, based on hair-raising personal experience, that he believes executions of the wrongly accused constitute a “universal problem” — why, in other words, there is “nothing aberrant about [the recent findings of] the Illinois court.” Then, having cast a gimlet eye at the present GOP presidential candidate’s self-serving assertion that “nothing like what had happened in Illinois had happened in Texas on his watch,” Cannon goes on to note that Dubya’s brother Jeb expressed the same sentiments despite the fact that Florida, where he is the governor, “has set aside the capital-murder convictions of some 20 Death Row inmates since 1973 — more than any other state.”