‘The Wire’ Explains A Lot

“If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.” This blog post would probably have gone unseen amid all the hubbub in Baltimore if it hadn’t been written by David Simon, screenwriter of the HBO series “The Wire” that made Baltimore world-famous as America’s decaying Moloch.

Those who spent 50 hours of their lives watching the serialized portrait of a neighborhood where inhabitants simply no longer needed the U.S. economy, watching how the TV show portrayed the police and the educational systems as decaying, were not surprised by the news out of Baltimore. It was the all-too-familiar iconography that comes with a run-down city.

Even the basic facts of the current protests are the same: “The Wire” is set in the same area of West Baltimore where Freddie Gray was forced into a police van and died a few days later. Ninety-seven percent of the population in this area is black. It has the fifth highest homicide rate in the USA, a high overall crime rate, numerous gangs, and more than 1 out of 2 individuals here is unemployed. Anyone who wants to know how things degenerated so badly will find answers by watching “The Wire.” According to Simon, class, not race, marginalized these people. They are predominantly black and universally poor. They live in a system where nobody cares any longer whether others get left behind. They are governed and controlled by officials who do not have enough staff nor budgets sufficient to ensure decent policing. Many are corrupt and many others make errors because they are understaffed and overworked. Even the powerful can’t improve things here. At best, a few individual fighters try to make improvements wherever they can on a case by case basis.

Beware: ‘The Wire’ Is Fictional

Be forewarned that “The Wire” is a work of fiction, and it would be a mistake to apply it one-to-one to Baltimore. And no, if you seek explanations for the massive anti-black police violence in poor neighborhoods, you’ll likewise find no conclusive explanations.

Remember, this was a TV series. It’s easy to get cynical if we allow the fictional characters to replace real people. It would be an oversimplification to replace the real words with those in the script. Social networks rightly point out that fans of the series have no special insight into the actual situation, nor are they engaged in eyewitness research. To a certain extent, it provides a well-informed alternative view of Baltimore: Simon worked for years as a crime beat reporter for The Baltimore Sun and researched local conditions prior to writing the scripts.

Keeping a Corrupt and Violent System Stable

Nonetheless, parallels presented in “The Wire” help make Baltimore’s problems understandable and keep us feeling as if we’re involved. Isn’t that better in the end than merely telling the story of another nameless dead black youth in another inner city, as terrible as that really is?

The current disturbances weren’t predicted by “The Wire.” Nothing was done to change the decaying systems, the corruption nor the violence. In real life, the discontent is spreading and the protesters increasing in number, in contrast to the poor and marginalized the TV series portrayed as helpless victims of circumstance.

The TV series ended seven years ago. The news of the past few weeks , however, shows that nothing much has changed regarding the societal catastrophes to which the series tried to call attention.