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The Wire still humanizes cops and barely mentions the racism inherent to policing though. There’s like one racist cop who gets reassigned immediately. The entire show spends maybe five minutes on him. I think the reality of cops is that they are rich, racist, cowardly buffoons who nonetheless follow almost any order. We never see them depicted in this way in any corporate media.
I fundamentally disagree with that take. The Wire doesn't have to mention it, it literally shows that policing is systemically racist, so while no singular cop regularly expresses racist views, and can be quite diverse in race themselves, they still end up treating the places they patrol, which are by and large poor black communities, as their personal fiefdoms, where they believe that they have carte-blance to 'fight crime' even as they commit crimes (like constant reckless DWI, that even 'good police' do) to no actual positive effect on the neighborhood because there is no trust in the police, because there is no reason to trust them.
What the Wire is guilty of is having characters who we are supposed to think are smart (Bunny Colvin) wax on about a time when it wasn't like this and blame it on the War on Drugs policy, which is some grade-A rose tinted glasses. But I like to think that it just portraying a guy who thinks like that (who may exist in the police), and not the writers actual opinion of historical policing.
Herc especially is portrayed as the stereotypical cop, a mildly racist buffoon who is so incompetent at his job that despite failing upwards the only actually good police work he does is when he has been fired from the police and now works as a PI for the lawyer of the very drug dealers that got him fired. We are supposed to be following the last few 'good po-lice', not necessarily the average cop, though them and their work do come up quite often. And pretty much all the cops are shown to be cowards who never do anything without a massive force disparity.
What we don't get is the openly racist cop who never gets any punishment and still continues to move up the ranks, but idk if that works for Baltimore particularly as a setting.
years ago I remember getting into a twitter argument with David Simon about this when he came out against local “defund the police” efforts. he insisted that his intent in making The Wire was not to show that police were systematically racist or incapable of reform. his position was basically that The Wire shows the negative outcomes of American police being underresourced and hamstrung by excessive red tape from out of touch bureaucrats. I still think the show is generally great, but I’ve never quite gotten over how Simon was able to make something so completely at odds with his stated real-life politics. My takeaway was mostly that the things I think work best about The Wire may have been totally accidental, which in a way almost makes it more impressive.
That is very interesting, I didn't follow that little saga.
That said, I will say that from his other works, Simon suffers from liberal blinders from having spent too much time with cops and journalists. But like chuds who are telling on themselves when they make movies, David Simon also tells on himself by literally seeing things from the cops point of view, including their bad behavior. In that way, his blinders actually work in his favor because he literally can't see it as 'consistent negligence and bad behavior'. A more self-aware propagandist would either hide the behavior so it doesn't exist or highlight the behavior so much that it would never get past the censors of production funding.