From encounter to civic question
The recurring sequence is less “violence proves society is collapsing” than a set of escalating questions: what does a bystander do; what protection is actually available; which norms still bind strangers; when does police or institutional presence matter; what happens when ordinary restraint fails; what does public space require from people who do not know one another?
Later institutional writing
Those questions become increasingly legible beside later work on institutional legitimacy, democratic failure, public competence, mutual obligation and the possibility that existing systems are no longer adequate to their stated functions. The relationship is evidentiary and experiential, not a single-cause theory of politics.
Why ambiguity remains useful
Leaving some scenes documentary-adjacent rather than fully biographically decoded preserves two truths at once: material experience can inform the work, and the public work need not collapse into an author's police report. The encyclopedia can use provenance internally to avoid misreading a scene as pure genre invention while still allowing the published object to operate in more than one register.