City hasn’t changed since ‘The Wire’ first aired

When the HBO show “The Wire” started airing in 2002, we didn’t have HBO so we didn’t get to watch the show. A few months ago, after hearing a lot of good things about the show, I checked the first season out of my local library, and my wife and I started watching and ended up watching all five seasons. Near the end, one of the major stories featured detectives discovering bodies in vacant homes, leading to a lot of cases being closed.

Now, here we are in 2022 with the police discovering one man shot to death inside a burning vacant home (“Carrollton Ridge residents decry conditions of ‘forgotten’ Baltimore neighborhood after one man is found shot in burning house,” May 11) and then another man shot and left to die in a vacant a week later (“Police find body in vacant South Baltimore home,” May 14) in addition to a lot of other shootings in the city that weekend. Sadly, as my wife and I watched and listened to elected and appointed members of the current administration on TV, it was difficult to separate what was happening now versus what we had just watched and listened to on “The Wire.” There were times when some of the current dialogue seemed to be taken from the script and updated. My guess is that if we were to watch “The Wire” again in 15 or 20 years, we would find that conditions, speeches and events wouldn’t have changed that much. Unfortunately, this seems to be happening all across the country.