So this is why my job is so hard.
After hearing reviewer after reviewer extol the quality of The Wire, I finally broke down and watched the first season last week. But it wasn’t the reviewers that sold me. It was the endorsement it got from a fellow urban youth worker who described it as the most true-to-life depiction of inner-city life he had seen in the media. I second that notion.
However, that accolade creates a dissonance. On the one hand I want to recommend that everyone go out and watch The Wire immediately. Like anything on TV, it has moments of sensationalism and hyperbole. But there is a lot of content there that rings true enough for The Wire to come up in our staff meetings with regular frequency. On four separate occasions during a meeting last Thursday I had the urge to connect our conversation to a scene from the show. On three of those occasions I resisted the urge in an effort to avoid redundancy and the appearance of obsession.
The one connection I did share involved a debate within the police force on the show. One group of officers was working a case to bring down a drug king pen who was clearing millions of dollars each year through illegal activity. However, their superiors wanted to make a “statement” and use information from the case to do raids that they could then parade in front of the media to demonstrate how effectiveness of the War on Drugs. The raids went through against the wishes of the investigating officers, even though doing the raids would show the hand of the police force, and tip the king pens off to the fact that they were being investigated.
Right before Christmas, the KCMO police department executed similar raids over the course of two days. News cameras from every station rode along. Stories and pictures got prominent places in the paper. It was all very dramatic. Significant amounts of drugs, guns and money were confiscated.
But they never got the big dogs.
In an instance down the street from where I work, people came out of their houses to see what was going on when they heard the commotion of the raids. Two particular guys stood outside their house checking everything out as people got loaded up in to police vehicles and contraband was confiscated.
What everyone in the neighborhood knows is that these two gentlemen are the main drug figures in the area. They have been running their enterprise out of the same house for years, ever since their parents passed on the family business to them a while. It’s common knowledge. I’m sure there are people in the police department who know all this as well. But on a day where the police department proclaimed a major victory, these two cats were spectators. They stood on the corner in broad daylight and took inventory. They knew what got taken. They knew who it got taken from. And they knew who might snitch on them in an effort to get a reduced sentence. They are insulated and smart and so efficient that the raids might have caused a small delay in their plans, but they certainly didn’t derail them.
For the record, I know there are good police in KCMO. We have relationships with some officers that are very helpful, smart, diligent and passionate. But they are outnumbered and outgunned. There are some officers in the city who are just trying to get promotions to other areas. It’s hard to be good police and it’s hard to do good police work, a tension which is evident in The Wire.
As much as I want to tell people to run out and watch that first season so that they can have a better understanding of what kids in the inner city are up against, it’s impossible for me to make a blanket endorsement. The content of the show is so graphic that it could be problematic for some. Not that it’s any more graphic than the stuff I’ve seen or heard in my experience, but it’s a lot to digest.
I liken the tension to the book of Judges where the story gets increasingly more violent as the narrative progresses. Make a movie out of Judges and it’s not going to be pretty near the end when you get to Judges 19-20 and the Levite chops up his concubine who has been gang-raped and sends a part of her body to each of the tribes of Israel. That’s jacked up. But there are statements there about cyclical violence and violence against women that we need to work out so that stuff like that doesn’t happen.
The only option here is to make a sliding scale to offer a viewing recommendation for The Wire
- If you are my wife, don’t watch. The violence is like that month you spent in the ER when the all-out drug and gang war was going on a couple of years ago. Plus, you are far more emotionally present than I am, so you will have a tough time detaching and interacting with the show on an intellectual as opposed to emotional level.
- If you are my mom or mother in-law, don’t watch. You don’t need to imagine me going into the homes and driving the streets that bear an uncanny resemblance to the show.
- If you think you know what it is going to take to “fix” the inner city, then you need to watch. I don’t care if it messes you up. If you are going to be part of the conversation, you need to be a realist.
- If a barrage of f-bombs, bullets and drugs don’t bug you, then watch.
- Anyone who watches needs to make sure they take away the rays of hope from the show. It’s easy to get so fixated on the bad stuff that you miss the story lines that are encouraging.
Renew and Restore
