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Prologue: My Enemy
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 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission. Sheinbaum sits in his beautiful house in Brentwood. He appears gruff, but when he smiles, he takes on the demeanor of a grandmotherly old woman. Sheinbaum recalls going to Nickerson Gardens with his good friend, Maxine Waters, to witness the police break up gangs meeting to negotiate the Watts gang truce. When they arrived, the place was swarming with police.
Nickerson Gardens is a public housing apartment building located in the Watts neighborhood of LA. It’s known as the birthplace of the Bounty Hunter Bloods street gang and is regularly patrolled by gangs. Sheinbaum and Waters’s impulse to go there to observe the truce negotiations demonstrates an effort to understand the dynamics of the community they are policing.
Themes
Sheinbaum spent an hour talking to some of the gang members who were gathered outside. He recalls how the men looked like they wanted to kill him, since he was a police commissioner “and therefore all the things that went along with being a cop.” One man looked like he’d been shot some time in the previous months or years. All the men “have been through the wars down there.” Sheinbaum recalls talking with the men and gaining insight into their circumstances.
The tension Sheinbaum identifies between himself and the gang members reaffirms the us vs. them dynamic introduced in the book’s prologue. There’s a clearly defined rivalry between law enforcement and the gangs, which comprise men and boys who turned to gang activity to find the stability and protection that law enforcement denies their community.
Themes
The police were mad Sheinbaum talked to the gang members, however. He recalls receiving a letter shortly after, accusing him of having “talked to our enemy.” He responded by heading down to seventy-seventh street and defending himself, explaining how he had taken advantage of learning about these people about whom he knows nothing—and wasn’t this something the cops would want him to do?
Law enforcement’s disapproval of Sheinbaum’s attempts to talk with the gang members reflects law enforcement’s desire to maintain the us vs. them dynamic. That dynamic draws a clear line between police and supposed criminals, with no room for nuance or attempt at understanding.
Themes
Sheinbaum contends that the abuse goes both ways: the police have abused the city, but the city has also abused the police. His main issue is his fellow police officers’ response to his trying to understand the gang members. They asked him, “So which side are you on?” Sheinbaum thinks that it’s a problem that there has to be a side.
Sheinbaum’s criticism of being asked to take a “side” points to how counterproductive he believes it is to police a community in a way that sees every citizen as a criminal. Brute force and imprisoning gang members do little to fix the problems that made gang violence an issue in the first place.
Themes
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