Warning: if you haven't watched David Simon's new HBO miniseries, "We Own This City", this 15,000+ word blog post of his spoils one of the major dramatic turns. If you're a fan of The Wire, you'll probably have some liking for WOTC just for its modern day depiction of Baltimore politics and policing, though being bound by accuracy to real events makes it a much different show.
Sean Suiter is one of the main characters in WOTC. Apparently what happened to him and his detective career has been a topic of much ongoing controversy.
You may want to watch The Wire, which was problematic enough. But then, nearly two decades later We Own This City (based on the non-fiction book of the same name) which breaks down a lot of the endemic corruption in Baltimore PD.
Related to the officer who died of probable suicide during the Baltimore Police Department 2017 racketeering indictment [1] fictionalized by the author in "We Own The City" [0].
Not as good as The Wire but still worth the watch thanks to the performances (of Jon Berthal among others) and the storytelling.
Enamored with David Simon's work, I picked up the DVD box set of "Homicide: Life on the Street", which I'd heard of before, but didn't have an attachment to. After seeing The Wire, then Treme (which took me a long time to adjust to not being The Wire, but may actually be even better) and then Show Me A Hero, it's fair to say that Davis Simon is just a brilliant writer.
Anyway, that was kind of a tangent to get to the real point, which is that Homicide, filmed a decade earlier than the Wire, highlighted many of the same troubles that The Wire did. Perhaps as the result of being based on the same (or similar) works, but if Homicide was authentic (and I believe it was) and the Wire was authentic (which I also believe), then it seems that Baltimore's had problems for some time.
I work in Baltimore now, and get to see some of the areas The Wire was filmed in enough to see that they've made real progress in certain areas, but on the whole, but Baltimore tends to do a good job of holding a spot in the top 10 of "most dangerous cities" lists year to year.
Check out "We Own This City" on HBO now, a more modern view of "The Wire". Unfortunately the story is still wrapped in people getting caught and justice being served, but it's a start.
not LA but HBO has a nice series about the same thing that happened in Baltimore - "We own this City" . made by the creators of the best show to ever grace TV - The Wire.
Police acting unruly. robbing and terrorizing citizens.
The Wire is a work of fiction. We Own This City is based on a non-fiction book about actual cops convicted for the crimes they committed. They both are set in Baltimore, the same producer is involved, and there are many actors appearing in both series, but the story lines have nothing to do with each other. So not sure about the "modern view".
It's hard to talk about David Simon without immediately thinking of The Wire, and I'm glad he mentioned it (he's infamously annoyed that people see it as compelling drama more than its attack against institutions, including the capitalist system):
> So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
I still think The Wire is the best TV drama yet made, and that includes Breaking Bad, though I haven't watched Sopranos yet. One of the most amazing things about its achievements is how so un-cop-show-like it is...besides cops being of mixed character, they almost never draw their guns on the show...and yet it's still an addictively entertaining show. Simon and his co-writers were so good at creating characters (and drawing from his deep reporting experience) that even as his show has a strong anti-capitalistic tone, the Wire keeps your attention no matter what your political beliefs. Perhaps Simon could eke out one more grand show...beliefs and opinions can be affected by popular culture as they are by political discourse.
The Wire is based off multiple people's journalism careers in the city of Baltimore. It's fictional, but it's fiction intended to synthesize David Simon's worldview about the failure of institutions (of all kinds) in modern American cities; it's a more effective communicator of that message than his raw reporting would be, and that raw reporting is clearly fair game for a class.
If it makes you feel better, check out _ Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets_ and _ The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood_ --- both great books, as gripping as The Wire, and used throughout the series as source material. Both totally nonfic.
Ed Burns, the series "script consultant" (if that's the right term) was a Baltimore cop, and David Simon spent many, many hours hanging out on street corners with Baltimore corner boys, first convincing them he wasn't a cop, then getting them to talk to him.
The Homicide book is an excellent start to his writing about Baltimore, and led to the series Homicide: Life on the Street, which paved the way for The Wire. Apart from the research, he has such a fantastic ear for dialogue - I can hear real voices when his characters talk, not least because many of them are based on real people (for example, both Jay Landsman [The Wire] and John Munch [Homicide] are based on the same real-life person).
It's so good in so many ways, but ultimately for me it shows its characters as rational and understandable, whichever side of the law they are on. Series 4 and 5 are not as strong as the first three, but still head-and-shoulders above most other shows. I know some people will prefer Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, but (good as those shows are) The Wire is peak TV imo.
David Simon is a national treasure. The Wire had lots of scenes on how metrics & incentives screwed up Baltimore city. Here is a great scene talking about metrics/stats from The Wire - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI
Article also refers to Martin Malley's ambition to be Maryland's governor that really screwed up the incentives and cooking of the books.
"How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That's what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you're going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who's burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he's going to court one day and he's out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who's doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I’ve just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That’s what the drug war built, and that’s what Martin O’Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.
"When you say, end the drug war, you mean basically decriminalize or stop enforcing?
Medicalize the problem, decriminalize — I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we’re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.
The Wire was written by David Simon, a Baltimore journalist who wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (made into a TV show named Homicide before The Wire) after embedding with the police for a year. It's basically the magnum opus of crime documentary from that era. The Wire is fiction but draws strongly from that work. I don't know how his experiences influenced him, but David Simon's politics are extremely left wing these days so make of that what you will.
Highly recommended, albeit a short spiritual successor to "The Wire."
https://www.hbo.com/we-own-this-city
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