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 Sergeant Charles Duke of the Special Weapons and Tactics Unit. Duke served as LAPD’s use-of-force expert and as a witness for the defense in the Simi Valley and Federal trials. Now, Duke stands, uniformed and holding a baton, to explain how Powell’s incorrect grasp on the baton is what caused him to administer 56 blows to Rodney King. In fact, hours before he beat King, the sergeant held Powell after baton training to criticize his “weak and inefficient” baton usage. Duke muses how Powell should have been taken out of the field that night.
Duke’s suggestion that Powell’s incorrect grasp on his baton necessitated administering over four dozen blows is an almost laughably thin excuse—Angela King just described how seriously injured Rodney King was after the beating, so calling Powell’s baton skills “weak and inefficient” seems a stretch.
Themes
Next, Duke explains how the LAPD were prohibited from using upper-body-control holds in 1982, after a report showed that this type of hold led to between 17 and 20 deaths over the preceding decade, primarily of Black people. If police had been able to use an upper-body-control hold on King, the incident would have lasted 15 seconds, tops. Duke complains about “the so-called community leaders” who “started a hysteria” about upper-body-control holds, claiming that it was “inhumane.” This resulted in upper-body-control holds being elevated in status from an intermediate use of force (which is what a baton is) to deadly force. Duke tells Smith that in all but one of the situations in which upper-body-control holds resulted in death, the victim had high levels of PCP and cocaine in their system. Therefore, Duke argues, it’s the drugs that caused the deaths—not officers’ use of force.
Duke inadvertently reveals that police brutality is common practice when the LAPD apprehends Black people. Duke’s final admission is perhaps the most callous: he insinuates that the deaths of Black people placed in upper-body-control-holds weren’t the fault of the restraining officers, but were the fault of the deceased victims, whose drug intoxication was the real cause of their deaths. Blaming the victims for their own deaths absolves the officers involved of any responsibility.
Themes
Duke recalls how Gilbert Lindsay, “a really neat man,” saw a demonstration of baton usage and stated, “you’re not gonna beat my people with that baton,” insisting that police use a chokehold instead. Others disagreed, saying they’d prefer broken bones to being choked. Eventually, the political atmosphere led to the elimination of upper-body-control holds.
Gilbert Lindsay was Los Angeles’s first Black City Council member. Duke invokes Lindsay, a Black man, to add more credibility to his defense that it was the system that banned chokeholds that was to blame for Rodney King’s injuries, not Powell, who administered the baton beating. Duke’s logic seems to be that the extremity of King’s beating could have been avoided had Powell been authorized to subdue him using a chokehold. Again, Duke’s argument is a weak attempt to claim that King’s beating was an unfortunate side effect of bureaucratic red tape rather than a brutal attack.
Themes
Although Duke can’t prove it, he suspects that Daryl Gates encouraged baton beatings similar to what occurred in the Rodney King incident to get back at the City Council and the Police Commission for taking away officers’ right to use chokeholds. He remembers how a sudden onslaught of use-of-force reports that were nearly identical to the King incident came through his office after the ban on chokeholds. When Duke expressed his concerns that officers would be arrested if they didn’t establish an alternative use of force, one of his superiors told him, “We’re gonna beat people into submission / and we’re gonna break bones.” After this, Duke didn’t voice concerns about baton usage again.
Here, Duke suggests that Daryl Gates authorized and encouraged officers to engage in excessive baton beatings like King’s to invite lawsuits and exact revenge on the City Council and Police Commission for banning chokeholds. In other words, the LAPD police chief ordered officers to brutalize Black bodies to settle a bureaucratic dispute. This further dehumanizes Black people—they’re framed as reasonable sacrifices to help Gates make his point.
Themes
Get the entire Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 LitChart as a printable PDF.
