But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies -- at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.Commissioner Bealefeld may not be comfortable with public dissent, or even a public critique of his agency. He may even believe that the recent decline in crime entitles him to denigrate as "stupid" or "slander" all prior dissent, as if the previous two decades of mismanagement in the Baltimore department had not happened and should not have been addressed by any act of storytelling, given that Baltimore is no longer among the most violent American cities, but merely a very violent one.Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work. Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.
Why would Baltimore's police commissioner pick a fight with David Simon? How weird. But I'm in favor of whatever it takes to get some good Simon trash-talk in circulation.
It's stupid, but the city government has always had a problem with how Simon portrayed Baltimore on The Wire. I remember Martin O'Malley (former mayor, now MD governor) complaining about it on a regular basis... and meanwhile the BPD has been pissed at him ever since Homicide came out 20 years ago.
But Simon's portrayal is, as far as I could ever tell, painfully honest and largely accurate. I've been mugged at gunpoint in Baltimore, and over half my friends at Hopkins can say the same. Two students in my graduating class were murdered; no suspect was ever found in one of those cases. The director of Hopkins security at the time was Ronald J Mullen, the former Deputy Commissioner for Operations for the BPD... Simon paints a rather vivid picture of him towards the beginning of Homicide, interestingly enough.
But yeah, it is a little weird that they're picking on Simon now, several years after the show ended and many, many years since the Baltimore Sun has been a paper of any substance!
Posted by: Evan E | January 23, 2011 at 05:44 PM
If this was the result of 40+ years of Republicans running the city the cries of racism and injustices would be as rampant as the crime.
Instead it's "Yes We Can". Somehow "Change" in our own backyard doesn't make any sense yet it's a great idea on a federal level.
Posted by: A Facebook User | April 18, 2012 at 09:08 AM