https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish
David Simon in Baltimore in 2010. JOSHUA ROBERTS/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE
MACARTHUR FOUNDATION
FILED 7:32 a.m. 04.29.2015 QA David Simon on Baltimore's Anguish
Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of real policing. By BILL
KELLER
David Simon is Baltimore's best-known chronicler of life on the hard
streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years,
wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and with former
homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote THE CORNER: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF
AN INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD1 (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO
miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the
HBO television series The Wire (2002-2008). Simon is a member of The
Marshall Project's advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday.
THE CORNER: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF AN INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD1
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
by David Simon and former Boston homicide detective Ed Burns,
1997
BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what's
going on there -- the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?
DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I'm not sure I
understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that
the drug war -- which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American
city -- was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in
terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police
department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in
stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would
have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers
to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in
Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local
government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made
everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary
behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers
how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.
Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous
thing. It's a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high
crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there
were jokes about, You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue?
You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds
too long. Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie
about when you got into district court.
Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot
of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on
the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that
loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street
level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't
even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance
that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones.
They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city
Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were
loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think
about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become
truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well
wanted.
BK: How does race figure into this? It's a city with a black majority
and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black
police force.
DS: What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a
line in Bonfire of the Vanities. When Ed and I reported The Corner,
it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western
District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without
thinking twice were black officers. 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. I think the two agendas
are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is
hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the
dog-piss out of people they're supposed to be policing, and there isn't
a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable.
But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent
of cell phones and digital cameras -- which have been transforming in
terms of documenting police violence -- back then, you were much more
vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You
take out your nightstick and you're white and you start hitting
somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black
officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I
didn't know quite what to do with that
