The icon of a cop beating the icon of a wheelchair guy who apparently was smoking. (Smoke lines coming from him) A marijuana leaf in the corner. Tag line: Feds Out of Our Meds. We did this chalk because the Feds came and busted Richard Lee and others from the Oaksterdam community.
Oaksterdam was down with the City and had done lots of great things for the community as well as revitalizing the downtown area. We like smoking pot too, so we were mad. Oaksterdam people were traumatized enough that they didn’t want protesters drawing any more police attention to them but the plaza was far enough away and we chalked our indignation with what might not have been the best design ever.
The crew really got into drawing the pot leaf though and started in on a little, spontaneous improvisation, adding blood to the officer’s club as well as some purple kush color to the originally white leaf. This went on be a tradition with one of my first regular chalkers: Teardrop, aka DJ Occupy, artist, talented free-styler, brilliant clown and guy who loves to color out of the lines. Teardrop is known to livestream fans for his antics and comic irony. We ran out of green so we just let people write stuff in the empty area. One of my worst chalk habits is running out of a color. It takes about two boxes (72 sticks each) to do a background of a chalk about 20 square feet.