The Wire: Victims & The Police Force

The following contains spoilers up until Season 3, Episode 8. It's advised that new viewers do not read further.

Crime is inevitable; especially in Baltimore. Police work is police work, and there are some spectacular police officers (pronounced as Poh-lease by many of the Baltimorians) and lieutenants that try to keep the murders down. But chain-of-command suggests that many of these "officers" and  people in charge really don't care about the victims or any people. Most do it s a job, rather than to serve the people.

There are numerous scenes in The Wire that showcase the grey area of morality that the show boasts exceptionally. Are the criminals as bad as one would suggest? Do the police actually care about the people they claim to protect?

Let's discuss examples of how victims of crime play into the politics of the police department as well as the mayor's office themselves. I'll use Season 2 as an example. 13 dead women are found in a storage unit in the Baltimore port; another one is floating in the docks. This is a tragic injustice, as these women were expected to prostitute their worth when they made in to America. Unfortunately due to one of them acting out, a foreign man killed her and then to keep the other 13 quiet, he suffocated them. Now, once information had surfaced about the dead women, no department wanted to deal with the murders. Chief Commissioner Bill Rawls wanted nothing to do with it; he claimed the crime didn't happen on Baltimore soil despite knowing nothing. Think about this; there were 14 people killed for practically no reason, and people don't want the murders on their plate. Yes, this would be a damn hard case to solve, no doubt, but there people are humans. They're human beings, they don't deserve to be tossed aside as nothing. But as evidenced in the show, many victims to the characters themselves are seen as statistics.

Detective James "Jimmy" McNulty, the loudmouth cop currently stuck on the docks due to a demotion at the start of Season 2, as able to find out privately that the crime took place on Baltimore Soil; and thus that is enough information to make Rawls be responsible for the case of the murders. McNulty essentially only does this to give the crime to Bill Rawls, since they have a burning hatred for one-another. One could argue that he did care about the victims, but not as much as he cared about inconveniencing the Chief Commissioner. Eventually Rawls gave the case to Daniels and then was able to set up a Major Case Unit, with members from the original crew back in Season 1, but it was all on the pretense of pissing off someone higher up in the chain-of-command.

A scene in Season 3 has Terry D'Agostino almost banking on another murder so they have more political points to use against the current mayor. It's sickening in a way; as I've said before: victims are thrown aside.

The Wire is a brilliant show; you probably know that if you're reading it, but moments in the show that regard victims sometimes make me cringe at the realism of the people; how it's always about THEIR agenda; and it's not about being good police.