the wire.

an ongoing discussion/moment of clarity.

words.

VICE: So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?

DAVID SIMON: We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone's pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court. You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, 'Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.' No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see. But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it's draconian and it's a disaster.

VICE: When you say, end the drug war, you mean basically decriminalize or stop enforcing?

DAVID SIMON: Medicalize the problem, decriminalize—I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State's Attorney told all his assistant state's attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we're not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.

...I mean, I know there are still a good many Baltimore cops who know their jobs and do their jobs with some real integrity and even precision. But if you look at why the city of Baltimore paid that $5.7 million for beating down people over the last few years, it's clear that there are way too many others for whom no code exists. Anyone and everyone was a potential ass-whipping—even people that were never otherwise charged with any real crimes. It's astonishing.

By the standard of that long list, Freddie Gray becomes almost plausible as a victim. He was a street guy. And before he came along, there were actual working people—citizens, taxpayers—who were indistinguishable from criminal suspects in the eyes of the police who were beating them down. Again, that's a department that has a diminished capacity to actually respond to crime or investigate crime, or to even distinguish innocence or guilt. And that comes from too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon."

VICE: David Simon Talks About Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong

SEE ALSO:

common core.

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