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A Weird Common Thread in Our Lives
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Captain Lane Haywood of the Compton Fire Department. He’s a tall, dark-skinned, handsome man with a broad smile and upbeat demeanor. Haywood remembers how difficult it was to contain all the riot’s fires with the number of men in his squad. When he and his men were up on the roof trying to extinguish the flames, people shot in their direction, though Haywood wasn’t sure if the shots were directed at them specifically. He and his men got down from the roof. Later, they discovered that the shots came from the police, who fired shots in the air to ward off a group of people who assembled to protect the fashion center.
Haywood’s observation of the police actively dispersing a crowd of people gathered to protect a building from looting suggests that the police were (unwittingly or purposefully) complicit in the riots’ destruction of property. This challenges the reverent manner in which several white characters have spoken about police officers—or, in Garcetti’s terms in “Magic,” the magic that gives a police officer an instant air of credibility.
Themes
Haywood describes the rest of the scene that unfolded that day. Cars were backed up down the street, and they could hear gunshots nearby, which police ignored. Looters broke the windows of the Pep Boys store down the street—right in front of the police. Haywood remembers having never before seen such angry women, either: he describes women sitting in the beds of pickup trucks yelling, “Let the motherfuckers burn.”
Again, Haywood observes police who were capable of interfering to quell the violence or curb the destruction wrought by the riots, but who actively chose to do nothing and watch chaos unfold around them. Heywood’s other recollections of the riots, such as angry, swearing women in beds of pickup trucks, help paint a scene of chaos and the disintegration of social order.
Themes
Haywood remembers when a task force of firefighters arrived from Huntington Beach. They had police escorts and bulletproof vests. Haywood notes how the task force came with vests for his squad, but all the nonessential workers took them before Haywood’s squad could claim them, and he was never even informed that there were vests for his men in the first place. He elaborates, explaining that his chief doesn’t like the department to wear vests, since it gives the impression that Compton is a dangerous place. Instead, the chief argues that the men’s badges are their vests—their “badge of courage.” Haywood disagrees, noting that courage doesn’t matter once a person hears gunfire. All they can think about then is the responsibility they have to return home safe to their families.
Haywood’s boss’s insistence that his force not wear vests to project an air of safety and reassurance to the public reflects the department’s strained, poorly organized infrastructure. It also signifies the triumph of empty, symbolic gesture over meaningful action. The failures of each department reflects the overall sense of unease and foreboding that seemed to envelop the city, as captured in the anxious, disillusioned testimonies of many of Smith’s interview subjects.
Themes
