In “The Wire,” the police department’s obsession with statistics–and what they’re willing to do to bend them–plays a major role. And according to the show’s creator, David Simon, this isn’t fiction–he believes it’s why Baltimore has erupted into violence.
In an extensive interview with The Marshall Project, Simon, who worked for twelve years as a police reporter for “The Baltimore Sun,” accused the city’s Democratic former mayor and governor Martin O’Malley of cooking the books. “Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults.”
“How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate,” he asked. “It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.”
“O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation,” he said. “And so there were people from City Hall who walked over [Police Commissioner Ed] Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically.”
Simon frequently talks about how drug war-era tactics destroyed police work in Baltimore by teaching cops to prioritize low-level arrests, which they profit from, over solving real crime. He argued that the residual effects of all this produced the kind of policing that led to Freddie Gray’s deaths and the riots:
Simon’s solution? “I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the f—ing drug war.
“The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court.”
Simon was also not convinced that Baltimore’s problem is purely a race issue–” The guys who would really kick your a– without thinking twice were black officers,” he said. “If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.”
He recalled how even his own crew members would be picked up by police officers while filming “The Wire”:
As of yet there’s no concrete evidence that O’Malley did in fact cook the books, and his office denied the charges to the Huffington Post.
But Simon insisted he’s not just out to smear O’Malley. “Everyone thinks I’ve got a hard-on for Marty because we battled over ‘The Wire,’ whether it was bad for the city, whether we’d be filming it in Baltimore. But it’s been years, and I mean, that’s over. I shook hands with him on the train last year and we buried it.”
