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Your Heads in Shame
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
In the spring of 1993, Smith interviews Gil Garcetti, who came into office as district attorney for Los Angeles in 1992. He replaced Ira Reiner, who had been in office during the riots. Garcetti is a handsome, physically fit man with prematurely white hair. He’s energetic and friendly. The head of public relations, Suzanne Childs, sits in on the interview. Garcetti describes how, contrary to popular opinion, jurors take their civic duty very seriously. Most criminal cases require a high level of proof. As a result, most serious jurors find that the prosecution fails to deliver the required evidence to deliver a guilty verdict. At the end of the day, Garcetti explains, most people trust the police and believe they are there to serve and protect the public. Most jurors haven’t had negative interactions with the police, and if they had, it’s generally something minor, such as a traffic ticket.
Garcetti’s monologue expands on the ideas the anonymous juror put forth in the previous scene. Garcetti seems to imply that the judicial system left the jurors with no choice but to render a not guilty verdict. For starters, criminal cases require a high burden of proof, which places the defense in a favorable position and means the prosecution has to work harder to persuade the jury. Furthermore, as law-abiding, majority white citizens, Garcetti suggests that the jurors would be predisposed to think that police officers are trustworthy, reliable court witnesses.
Themes
Because the broader culture makes people trust police officers, when an officer says something on the witness stand, “there is something magic / that comes over that individual.” If an officer comes in with guns strapped to his jacket, they’re less likely to win over the jury. However, if they come in dressed professionally and act politely, they convey to the jury that they are trustworthy and there to protect them. And people want to believe that the police officers are there to protect them, Garcetti notes, because people today “liv[e] / in a state of fear.” While the credibility of police is not quite as stable as it used to be, by and large, most people want to believe that the police are there to help them.
Garcetti describes the process by which jurors are compelled to trust police officers as “something magic / that comes over that individual.” There’s nothing magical going on in the Simi Valley trial. However, Garcetti implies that the jurors (who were all white) trust and empathize with white police officers more than they do with Black victims like Rodney King. Essentially, he implies that because white jurors want to maintain their idealized vision of who and what the police are, they deliver a not guilty verdict.
Themes
