The Sneaky Viper Under Your Wiper : There is a law against putting handbills on cars; unfortunately, there is little enforcement

Businesses sell things. To do this they advertise. Advertising has to win friends. Doesn’t it?

Well, maybe not.

Some ads seem calculated to summon pagan rage, not the yen to spend. Such ads are the object of a widely shared pet peeve. Yes, we are talking about flyers left on cars.

You know the scene. You’re loaded with packages and fumbling for your keys and there it is, a dreaded handbill stuck under your windshield wiper. Even if you normally radiate goodwill, your immediate reaction is likely to be helpless fury.

The thing gives you three choices:

1. Leave it there (impractical).

2. Add it to the litter on the asphalt (tacky, punishable).

3. Finger-tweeze the damnable thing off the windshield to discard later, which of course is just what the foul knave who had it put there wants, since, at some point, you might actually read it.

There oughta be a law? There is a law. Los Angeles is one of a number of Southern California cities that have ordinances against handbilling cars. What there ought to be is enforcement.

A couple of years ago the L.A. City Council realized that nobody enforced it. Besides, it’s pointless to collar the hapless wretches pitchforked by financial fate into distributing the flyers.

So, in 1992, the council cleared the way for a giant crackdown by amending the law. It created the legal presumption that whatever person or business whose name is on an offending flyer is the culprit. Now the invisible kingpins of such litter can be hauled into court! If you’re on the ad on the windshield, buddy, you’d better have evidence that you aren’t to blame for having put it there, or suffer the awful penalty of the law.

Well, big deal. City prosecutors could not say for sure last week how many cases have been brought against suspected windshield litterers, but one highly placed source confessed to a specific recollection of zero.

The flyers are still all over the place. A batch was spotted last week on cars at the Northridge Fashion Center. They are papering parking lots, blocking windshields, defiling auto interiors, pouring ink runoff into the bay, ruining shopping trips, smudging the fat innocent hands of car-seated toddlers, smoldering in pockets at breasts swollen with determination to throw them away without reading them.

OK, OK, this isn’t the crime of the century. But officer-- officer?-- can’t it at least be the crime of the week?