I know, I know, I’m terribly late to the party, but thanks to the entire series being on a web-app of my cable TV provider, I’m finally watching The Wire. I’m about half way through Season 2 right now.
No revelations that it’s a great series, I’ve had a couple of late nights thus far, when I’ve just had to watch one more episode.
Curious about a few things in the series and wondering if anyone has any insight into them.
The series portrays a really poor view of the Baltimore PD. I understand the show tried for realism, but is the amount of politics shown in any realistic for a major urban police force? It seemed there were more officers than not. who were either lazy, incompetent, shifty or up to their necks in outright fraud. At a certain level of seniority it seems that the idea of actually policing took a very distant back seat.
Is it really that hard to get a wiretap? It was presented as a channel of last resort when all other investigation options failed. I can understand why you’d need a warrant, but to me it seems a wiretap would just be another string to an investigation, rather than ‘we’ve exhausted all other avenues’. Has this changed since the the time period where the show was set.
Is the drug trade really that obvious? dozens of people just hanging out on street corners? (Sorry if this sounds naive, but this is an Aussie asking, who has no idea how I’d go about getting my hands on some weed let alone anything harder).
Well I don’t want to spoil anything about the show, but you have to remember that the taskforce that has the most screentime in season 1 is deliberately hamstrung by the higher-ups from the get-go, which explains why it’s heavily polluted by “humps”. In the later seasons the police, at least at street and investigator levels, are portrayed more evenly.
However, the general trend still is that they’re generally unsuited or unwilling to pursue complex and involved investigations and favour the “rip and run” approach, busting street-level traffickers for paltry amounts of drugs because it’s quick and easy rather than going after the big players in earnest. I guess you could still call that intellectual laziness.
I’m not sure if that’s an universal constant ; but the idea that modern police forces are chasing “the stats” rather than actively seeking effective enforcement solutions to curb crime, and drug sale in particular, doesn’t seem restricted to The Wire, or even American police.
The 90s French film* L.627* (the title refers to the article legislating controlled substances in the French legal code), which was written by an ex-cop, presents a similar situation. The main protagonist is a narcotics cop who joined that force specifically to try and make a difference ; but other members of his unit are in it just for the paycheck and he at one point butts heads with his supervisor over the investigative strategy of their unit, who in turn exasperatedly explains that (paraphrased, it’s been a while since I watched it) “Every time we arrest one of these knuckleheads, I put a checkmark on a sheet. Arrest, checkmark, arrest, checkmark. The checkmark doesn’t give a shit if it’s a kilo or a gram, and at the end of the month all my superiors care about is matching their quota with a nice long row of checkmarks. It’s not a complicated fucking system !”
This situation is due both to simple management inadequacies, as the police is monitored by administrations, bureaucracies and politicians that often have no idea what good police work is, much less how to encourage it - and who focus on what they can sell the public and the media to prove they’re doing a good job ; but also to lack of means to do the job properly. Everybody has to do more with less, especially when the tax payers don’t want their taxes to go up. Well, you get what you pay for, don’t you ?
And ultimately, the tax payers don’t *really *give an actual shit, since the drug trade along with the gang violence surrounding it is mostly a problem that affects the poorer and more disenfranchised sections of the population ; and indeed is often just a stick used to beat these communities with. Even in France, the cops and society at large don’t seem to really give a shit about cocaine or heroin use among the “jet set” and “golden youth” - but watch yourself around that ghetto weed !
If anything, David Simon undersold how bad the Baltimore PD is. Here’s a decent high-level overview of how Baltimore’s police force operates. At one point, the mayor ordered unconstitutional mass arrests in order to inflate the PD’s apparent effectiveness. The kind of internecine squabbling depicted on the show seems pretty minor by comparison, and some of the rank and file cops (Daniels, Carver, Kima, Bunk), while occasionally playing fast and loose with the rules, at least maintain a core of decency and want to be “real police.”
Not sure about the wiretaps. I imagine the depiction of the more-or-less open drug trade is pretty accurate.
One of the through lines of the series are how institutions, while starting out with the best of intentions, have actually made it impossible to do much of any good.
The phrase missing from all of the above is ‘War on Drugs’ - a bogus, political concept that made no sense and no one believed in. Later made more stupid by additions like ‘three strikes’.
It would be harder to design laws to be specifically apartheid in character.
