Good Cops, Bad Cops and Systemic Racism: Watching The Wire in the Era of ACAB

Liam Rue 21'
October 2020

Since I am too lazy to end my free trial to HBO, I decided to finally watch The Wire. Given the show is now almost 20 years old, quite a bit of time has passed since it became a critically-acclaimed hit (and arguably the greatest show of all time). That has given it newfound historical relevance, in particular for its portrayal of law enforcement in post-9/11 America. It has also regained relevance in the wake of nationwide backlash against police and renewed conversations about racial justice, police brutality, and the role of police in our nation’s streets.

The plot is enthralling: Detective McNulty and his team build a case against a lucrative drug-dealing operation in the Baltimore projects, along the way having to stay one step ahead of not just the gang they’re investigating but also the corrupt superiors in the Baltimore Police Department trying to stop them. On the other side, the gang member whose murder charge started the investigation begins to question the life of gang-banging he has grown into. The characters are interesting and complex; the acting is gripping. Baltimore, gritty and fallen on hard times then as it is now, feels like it is its own character.

At first glance, the show is a police procedural and crime show in the vein of Law and Order. Upon closer inspection, though (not that close, really), the show is a scathing critique of poverty and crime in American cities and the criminal justice system that perpetuates it.

With the debate over policing and racism that has exploded since June, this overarching theme of The Wire is more relevant than ever. Throughout the show, it is shocking how cops treat the citizens they are supposed to be serving. On one occasion, three cops on patrol at 2 A.M. -- two white, one black, and all drunk -- go to the projects to harass the people there. They arbitrarily handcuff several black men coming out of the building and throw them onto the ground, and one of the three cops -- trigger happy and perhaps a bit racist as well -- ends up punching a kid’s eye out just because he was sitting on their cop car.

Is this really how cops should be interacting with the community? The worst part is that, if that cop did what he did today, it could easily go viral on social media and become a national scandal. In the show, however, the only consequences were for the kid who went blind in one eye because of one cop’s insecurities.

The show does nothing to dispel the idea that cops avoid accountability for themselves by scratching each others’ backs. A routine talking point in the show is that you can’t throw another cop under the bus, no matter how bad they’ve screwed up. All cops are supposed to do is be loyal and show criminals how tough they are by brutalizing them.

The black cops tend to be just as brutal to their fellow African-Americans as the white cops, because they all share the mentality that they serve themselves before anyone else. It verifies the ideas behind the rallying cry of ACAB : that there may be good cops who want to serve their communities, but they are working within a corrupt, oppressive system that they only enable by joining. It makes you wonder: are cops any better than the gangs they try to fight, or are they their own violent, oppressive gang?

Further, everything the police in the show do to stop the drug-dealing operation in the Baltimore projects fails to do anything to address the root causes of why it exists in the first place. Low-income African-Americans in Baltimore and other cities across America are victims of centuries of systemic racism that has kept these communities caught in a vicious cycle of poverty, crime and death.

Without access to good public education and by extension good job opportunities in their community due to job discrimination, redlining and white flight, there is not enough money in the community to improve peoples’ conditions. They then resort to crime to stay afloat, dropping out of whatever under-funded school they were in to join a gang to have some semblance of financial stability. This was the case of Michael B. Jordan’s character Wallace, who, disillusioned by the violence, wanted to go back to high school and graduate but couldn’t because of his duties as a drug dealer.

As parents are either locked up or killed on the street, their children are left without both financial security and a role model. The result is they are more likely to go down the same dead-end path. Others not involved in gang activity themselves are ravaged by the drugs cheaply sold to them by dealers in their community, which they use to cope with debilitating poverty as well as for the lack of better things to do. This similarly leads to broken homes and children left without upright parents they can look up to. As so many of these people are born into the life from an early age, it is all they know. The character Wallace, for instance, had never gone beyond West Baltimore. The character D’Angelo, in a final interrogation with cops, began to talk about how that life of gangbanging and hustling was all he and others in Baltimore ever knew, which gave them no clear way to change course.

Since the drugs these groups are selling are illegal and unregulated, they cannot just go to the police for help when someone else steals their livelihood as an alcohol salesman would. The result is they can only get even by striking back at the other gangs who try to steal from them through illegal violence. Early in the series, after D’Angelo feels remorse for murdering a man, he asks his fellow gangbangers why they can’t all just sell drugs without any violence or killing. He is quickly reminded why not when another gang robs their drug stash to get a hold of their precious product.

Police respond to this poverty-driven increase in crime and substance abuse by locking up these people instead of helping them get out of the situation they’re in. Drug addiction, instead of being treated as a mental illness, is treated as a crime.

Instead of restorative justice that provides the necessary resources for criminals to reintegrate into society as better, more stable people than they were before, they are sent away to rot in prison for years on end. Not only does this prevent the offender from escaping poverty to become a stable, upstanding citizen; it deprives their family of an important source of income as well as a role model. Thus, this cycle of poverty, addiction and violence is only perpetuated because the criminal justice system is punitive rather than restorative.

Sure, the police can lock up the kingpin and all his henchmen, but then what? Junkies will still need their daily fix, and the result will be a power vacuum over who will take over the lucrative business. And just like that, at the end of the day, the only thing that changed is that there were a dozen more men behind bars and a dozen more families without food on the table.

Further, as cops develop prejudices against these communities of color, the result is innocent people like George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray -- and, most recently, Walter Wallce Jr. -- are killed. It’s no coincidence that Baltimore was where Freddie Gray was killed by police. A community that felt marginalized and oppressed by its police unsurprisingly lashed out with mass protesting, rioting and looting.

Arguably now more than ever, The Wire is a constant reminder of how much police departments need to change to better serve their communities. Alternatively, it may be a reminder that the police are better off not profiling these communities at all. Instead, perhaps police should be defunded and transfer the billions they get to programs that will solve the problems of poverty, mass incarceration, unevenly funded (and segregated) schools and the overcriminalization of drugs at the root of the entire plot of The Wire.

Nonetheless, reducing all of the characters in The Wire to either cops or gangbangers is an oversimplification at best, and a disservice to the nuances of the characters and their storylines. The greatest virtue of The Wire is that it shows the human side of widely misunderstood groups. One of the gang’s bosses, Stringer Bell, is attending community college. D’Angelo, the gangbanger investigated for murder, goes out of his way to help a younger kid get out of the game. Omar Little, a ruthless lone ranger of sorts who spends his free time stealing gangs’ drug stashes with a double-barrel shotgun, is unapologetically gay in a time when homosexuality and gangbanging were supposed to be like oil and water. Detective Kima Greggs, who helps her colleagues brutalize suspects, is also a lifeline to a heroin addict. And the main character McNulty, committed to justice at the expense of his career, is a depressed alcoholic by night, condemned to a lowly bachelor’s pad and fighting with his ex-wife to see his kids. To think that these characters -- police and gangbangers alike -- would all be much better individuals if it weren’t for the cold and corrupt systems they were each part of.