20 years later, ‘The Wire’ still has fans buzzing about Baltimore
In the summer of 2004, actor Jamie Hector was filming an episode from the third season of “The Wire” late at night on a rundown street in East Baltimore when shots rang out. He knew instantly that these were real bullets coming from a real gun, not the blank-firing pistols used on set.
“A guy sitting on his stoop at the other end of the block had been watching us film the scene,” said Hector, 46, “and someone drove by and shot him.”
The actor realized the shooting might been carried out by someone not unlike his character on “The Wire,” the ruthless, young drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield.
“On the set, we were somewhat protected and isolated,” Hector said, “but this still happened. I thought: ‘This is the show we were putting together to try to address those ills.’”
Twenty years ago, on June 2, 2002, few people outside of Baltimore noticed when “The Wire” debuted on HBO. Though critics applauded, “The Wire” struggled initially to find its audience and narrowly avoided cancellation.
But over the years, the show gained traction. Now, “The Wire” is a cultural phenomenon. It routinely makes lists of the greatest TV shows of all time.
“The Wire” became those things in large part because creators David Simon, a former police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective and middle school teacher, aimed to do more than just tell a riveting human story.
The unforgettable characters they created — Stringer Bell, who ran meetings of his drug cartel based on procedures set forth in Robert’s Rules of Order; Omar Little, the stickup man with a strict moral code; Bubbles, the heartbreakingly gentle
heroin addict — were the conduit for a larger message.
Burns summarized it like this: “The war on drugs and the disinterest in this country in people who are poor is a Holocaust in slow motion, and it burns through generation after generation.”
In the show, Baltimore functions as a microcosm of the problems afflicting urban America.
“We set the series in Baltimore because that’s what we knew,” Simon said. “But we were addressing issues that are national in nature. We could have told similar stories in Philadelphia or Chicago.”
Each season took an indepth look at what the creators believed to be the fractures, fault lines and failures of key institutions from police policy to the schools.
“We had the sense that our institutions in many cases were measuring the wrong things and attending to problems that weren’t actual problems,” Simon said.
“When Ed was in the school system, he saw how the metrics they were using to measure progress were flawed. In the police department, the metrics of success were guns and dope on the
table. If we arrest everybody, we make the city safer. That kind of logic was rewarded politically.”
Simon and Burns acknowledge that many people have disagreed — some vehemently — with their analysis of Baltimore’s social ills, including former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who also served two terms as the city’s mayor. “The Wire” is a work of fiction that represents the point of view of two white, middle-aged men.
Nonetheless, from 2002 to 2008, “The Wire” painted a portrait of Baltimore that for better or worse, stuck in a lot of people’s minds, not just in Maryland but internationally. So on the series’ anniversary, it makes sense to take a look at how the critical Baltimore institutions that the series illuminated are faring in 2022.
What has changed? It’s difficult to interpret the headlines about the Baltimore Police Department during the past two decades in any way that isn’t unrelentingly grim.
In 2002, the year “The Wire’ debuted, Baltimore recorded 254 homicides. There were 338 homicides in 2021, the seventh year in a row
that slayings have topped 300. And violence in the city is trending to hit that figure again this year.
During the past two decades, relations between police officers and the community hit their lowest point during the unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.
And just two years later, federal racketeering charges were filed against members of the police department’s elite Gun Trace Task Force, who stole drugs and money while searching the homes and cars of drug dealers and innocent civilians. Numerous officers either were convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes. The case gave rise to another HBO series, “We Own This City,” which debuted in April.
University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke said these issues have the same root cause: treating drug addiction as a crime instead of a public health crisis. As Baltimore’s mayor from 1987 to 1999, Schmoke was vilified when he urged Congress to decriminalize drugs. Now, he believes the national conversation is starting to change.