The Wire: Baltimore, Trash, and Natural Police

At the moment, I am completely absorbed in David Simon's HBO drama, The Wire. Having just finished the first season, it no doubt ranks as some of the best television I've ever seen. Simon takes us deep into Body-more, Murdaland, far beyond Camden Yards and the city's famed crab houses. In Season One, Mc Nulty, Daniels, Greggs, Freamon, and the rest of the mismatched BPD crew work the drug-ridden West Baltimore low rises, hoping to get some shit on the seemingly untouchable kingpin, Avon Barksdale.

Having lived in Baltimore for four years, I have an added interest in the show, especially in its depiction of the city I once called home. I can attest to the fact that, despite Baltimore's many charms, it is a filthy sewer. For Simon, part of the narrative comes out of this portrayal of his city. The Wire frames its shots carefully. In the foreground, while we see block after block of boarded up row houses, overgrown vacant lots filled with old furniture, and garbage strewn about everywhere; there, in that same shot, is the gleaming skyline and Inner Harbor beyond. Such contrasting worlds, just a mile or so apart. Simon heightens the level of frustration we feel for these overwhelmed cops with scenes of detectives searching, post- crime, for any scrap of evidence amidst a decaying, urban war zone. As the camera pans the ground in front of Bunk and McNulty on some vacant lot, viewers ask themselves, "How in the hell do they find anything in that shithole?"

A little later in the season, however, Simon cleverly alters our view of the littered streets. After Greggs "takes two for the company" in an undercover bust gone bad, the crew sets out looking for the shooters. Freamon and Prez use the wire to track a call put in to "Stringer" Bell (the brains behind the Barksdale empire) from a pay phone in northwest 20 minutes or so after the shooting. The prints on the phone are no good, but there, in the street near the phone, is a crumpled can of orange Slice (the same can we saw "Little Man," a Barksdale underling, thoughtlessly toss to the ground after calling Bell in a previous scene). It's bagged and dusted, and the search is on for Greggs' shooter.

Simon forces viewers of the Wire to attend to the details. The act of littering, so common a deed in the projects that we shouldn't even notice it, becomes a key event later in the episode. And who thinks to inspect a can laying in the street? Freamon, of course, he's 'natural police'.