The Wire Thread

[Karl_b]

10 times! That's some going Lifey. 

 

We've recently put it in the pile for another watch, our third, and I'm excited to get started. I appreciated it so much more the second time around, especially having also read some of the books proceeding and following the series. I can only imagine it looks more and more prescient as the years go by.

[lifetime fan]

4 minutes ago, Karl_b said:

10 times! That's some going Lifey. 

 

We've recently put it in the pile for another watch, our third, and I'm excited to get started. I appreciated it so much more the second time around, especially having also read some of the books proceeding and following the series. I can only imagine it looks more and more prescient as the years go by.

Even watching it this time there’s still little bits you’d never picked up on before. 
 

Greatest telly ever made. 

[Remmie]

I'm always surprised when I read on here about series/season 2 being their favourite as I found it the weakest after 5. But then I'm sure that's more my mistake, so clearly need to watch it again. 

 

 

[KMD7]

6 minutes ago, Remmie said:

I'm always surprised when I read on here about series/season 2 being their favourite as I found it the weakest after 5. But then I'm sure that's more my mistake, so clearly need to watch it again. 

 

 

It's all about Frank and Nick for me Rem, Decent people getting slowly dragged into the game and it overwhelming them.  The actor who played Nick is superb I thought, and I felt like crying for Frank. 

 

It wasn't until I watched it a second and third time that I fully appreciated it. Would have probably had seasons 1 3 and 4 ahead of it at first.  Its up there with them now. 

[Guest]

I think the poll is broken. Click on season 5 where it says 1 and there are nearly 40 names that have voted on it.

 

Mind you, Dave U is one of the names that voted so maybe it's not so much a mistake as a dupe.

[Stouffer]

26 minutes ago, Remmie said:

I'm always surprised when I read on here about series/season 2 being their favourite as I found it the weakest after 5. But then I'm sure that's more my mistake, so clearly need to watch it again. 

 

 

Series 2 stands out because it's noticeably different to the others. I can't put my finger on why but it's my favourite too.

[Karl_b]

I can't see my vote in the poll but think at the time, after one viewing, I voted for Season 4. After a second watch I'd change my vote to Season 2. It resonates the most with me, normal blokes down on their luck, the plight of blue collar life and aspiring to be something "higher". 

[lifetime fan]

7 hours ago, KMD7 said:

Started watching it again last week and convinced the wife to watch it this time.  We're on season 3 now and the Mrs is hooked.  Her favourite so far is season 2.

Frank Sobotka man, hits me right in the feels every time.  I still want to strangle Ziggy the little cunt.  

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Remmie said:

I'm always surprised when I read on here about series/season 2 being their favourite as I found it the weakest after 5. But then I'm sure that's more my mistake, so clearly need to watch it again. 

 

 

 

2 hours ago, KMD7 said:

It's all about Frank and Nick for me Rem, Decent people getting slowly dragged into the game and it overwhelming them.  The actor who played Nick is superb I thought, and I felt like crying for Frank. 

 

It wasn't until I watched it a second and third time that I fully appreciated it. Would have probably had seasons 1 3 and 4 ahead of it at first.  Its up there with them now. 

 

2 hours ago, Stouffer said:

Series 2 stands out because it's noticeably different to the others. I can't put my finger on why but it's my favourite too.

 

2 hours ago, Karl_b said:

I can't see my vote in the poll but think at the time, after one viewing, I voted for Season 4. After a second watch I'd change my vote to Season 2. It resonates the most with me, normal blokes down on their luck, the plight of blue collar life and aspiring to be something "higher". 

Season 2 is my favourite because it shows how fucked the system is for everyone unless they have money. 
 

The game is rigged. 
 

It shows the problems across different parts of the city, different backgrounds, different races...

 

Everything's different but everything’s the same. 

 

Also my ol fella was a docker and I watched him go through the exact same process when I was younger with him ultimately being made redundant and being unemployed for over 12 months. 
 

I guess that makes it hit home even more. 

[skend04]

Finally finished this after a seven year gap, having lost the DVDs during a house move. Such a great show, a real Greek Tragedy if ever there was one where the system keeps on fucking you.

 

Agree with most, Series 5 is the least best as it felt rushed, especially in comparison to the others. Both 2 and 4 are the proper heartbreakers. 

 

One thing I noticed, the scenes aren't actually very long or the editting make them appear that way. Nowadays there's a propensity to dwell or to have pretty long expositions, this show doesn't do that, so even at an hour's run time for each episode it feels like it's flying by.

[lifetime fan]

On 12/07/2020 at 08:34, skend04 said:

Finally finished this after a seven year gap, having lost the DVDs during a house move. Such a great show, a real Greek Tragedy if ever there was one where the system keeps on fucking you.

 

Agree with most, Series 5 is the least best as it felt rushed, especially in comparison to the others. Both 2 and 4 are the proper heartbreakers. 

 

One thing I noticed, the scenes aren't actually very long or the editting make them appear that way. Nowadays there's a propensity to dwell or to have pretty long expositions, this show doesn't do that, so even at an hour's run time for each episode it feels like it's flying by.

The greatest telly ever. 

[lifetime fan]

If anyone wants all 5 series on DVD (not the boxset) they can have them for a tenner to a Milton Keynes food bank charity. 

[Johnlj]

On 14/07/2020 at 21:08, Colonel Kurtz said:

Been years since I watched this so will have to give it another go. Omar was a brilliant character. 

If you come at the king, you best not miss.

 

On a sidenote, it's weird seeing Marlo play football for Arsenal these days.

[Kevin D]

I was reading the article that prompted 2Pac to write "Brenda's got a baby" and, as well as being season 4 on steroids,  there's some real Brother Mouzone shit in there.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/29/nyregion/a-child-mother-in-the-jaws-of-new-york.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1

 

At 12 years old, the New York City girl is already an orphan, a rape victim and a mother. Now, two days after her newborn son was rescued from the maw of a trash compactor, she has become something more -- a symbol of the violence that stalks the young in some corners of this city.

 

"She never had no chance," said a neighbor, who, like most others who were interviewed yesterday, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "Most of us don't expect her to recover from this. She has gone through too much too young."

 

At 4, a fire killed both her parents, and she passed into the care of an aunt, whom her neighbors in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn described as emotionally unstable. Drugs and alcohol invaded the home, the neighbors said. The girl was consigned to a class for slow learners and faithfully attended each day, perhaps her only triumph in a world where staying in school is a Herculean task.

 

As if to punctuate the disorder of a life as troubled as it has been short, the girl's 21-year-old cousin and adoptive brother, Clarence Perry, was arrested yesterday as he threatened to fling himself off the roof of the housing- project building where they live. He told the police that he was the father of the baby. He was charged with rape.

 

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The girl was accused of putting the infant in a trash chute hours after she gave birth and letting the baby, a boy wrapped in a shopping bag, fall four stories into the compactor. Two maintenance men said they heard the baby's cries just as they were about to start the machine. The baby suffered hypothermia but no bodily injuries, and the young mother was charged as a juvenile with attempted murder.

 

The police said that the city's Child Welfare Administration had taken custody of the infant and the 12-year-old, and that they would be placed in foster care as soon as they left Brookdale Hospital.

 

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The girl has spent most of her life in the gritty streets of Brownsville. Around the storefronts and vacant lots outside her doorstep, crack dealers ply their trade.

Her neighbors, stunned by the news that an infant had been cast into their garbage, awoke yesterday to find Clarence Perry, known to his friends as "Turtle," raving on their rooftop.

"I got up to the roof and saw him there," said Larry Varick, a security guard. "He was saying he had nothing more to live for, that his family was against him."

 

 

Mr. Varick, employed by a security company that hires primarily Muslims, spoke outside Noble Drew Ali Plaza I, the 385-apartment red-brick complex where the family lives.

As he talked, two men started shouting near the front gate. Passers-by scurried for cover and darted indoors.

 

"I'll kill you," a man in a red sweat shirt, held back by two friends, said to another young man. "I'll kill you. Just wait till I get back here. You are dead."

 

The man in the red sweat shirt, identified by neighbors as a member of the Perry family, had apparently become angry when a few men made comments about the abandoned baby as he walked by.

 

"This is all getting out of hand," Mr. Varick said as he watched. "These kids got no parents, no home life, and this is what happens. They go crazy."

 

The girl's aunt, Gladys Perry, has retained a lawyer, and she and the other members of the family refused to speak with reporters.

 

The New York Times is not printing the girl's name. Along with many newspapers, The Times ordinarily omits the names of sex-crime victims and juvenile suspects. Playing Indoors

Neighbors said the girl had played indoors and left her apartment only to go to school. She attended a sixth-grade special-education class every day at the Thelma J. Hamilton Junior High School, at 985 Rockaway Avenue.

 

James Siegal, a teacher who supervises a program at the junior high for pregnant students, said he had not known that the girl was pregnant.

 

"It's totally amazing that she was sitting in the lunchroom yesterday as if nothing happened," he said.

 

"We never saw her out here," said a woman who lives in the housing complex. "She stayed at home. She was quiet and withdrawn. She was a slow girl, but nice."

 

The girl was raised in a home that did little to restore the stability lost when she was orphaned, neighbors said. She lived in a three-bedroom apartment with her aunt, her cousin Mr. Perry and two other men in their late teens or early 20's who are either cousins or brothers, police officials said. Neighbors said Gladys Perry had a history of mental problems and had suffered a nervous breakdown.

 

"She grew up around alcohol and drugs," said a close friend of the family, referring to the 12-year-old. "There were many times when she was left alone with the other children. She had no real adult figure in her life."

 

Mr. Perry, the adoptive brother, was in police custody yesterday, charged with endangering the welfare of a minor and with second-degree rape under state laws prohibiting sexual intercourse with girls younger than 14. The neighbors said he had spent most of his time outside the front gate of the housing complex. They described the area as a place where crack is sold and where rival local gangs, the Co-ops and The Young Guns, frequently clash, often with automatic weapons.

 

But the arrival of Muslim security guards three years ago, and a commitment by the owners of the complex to clean the place up, has started to make a difference in the quality of life, people in the area said.

 

Still, a man was killed inside the complex two months ago, shot 12 times. And another man was shot to death there a year ago. Neighbors said he was a major drug dealer who ran his operation out of the complex.

 

Some residents contend that the killing was carried out by Muslims, who scorn the use of drugs.

 

Some Muslims later met with local drug dealers and ordered them to leave the apartment complex, residents said. The Muslim security guards said they do not carry weapons. 

 

"We do not know who carried out the murder," said the manager, Victor Zilber. "All we know is that the drug dealers began to clear out and life improved. The drug dealers do not want to fight the Black Muslims."

 

Under the watch of the Muslims, the girl could walk the corridors of her building without fear, but her home life apparently remained a shambles. When her aunt was absent, the girl had sex with Mr. Perry at least twice, she told the police.

 

They said the girl has asked for the baby.

 

"She wants the baby back," said Sgt. Arthur Stoecker of the 73d Precinct Detective Squad. "In these types of cases, at such a young age, they panic. They are between a rock and a hard place. They don't know what to do."

 

He said the 12-year-old gave birth in the early morning in her bedroom in her fourth-floor apartment and held onto the baby until dawn.

 

"She knew she had to go to school," he said. "It was getting to where something had to be done."

 

The police yesterday were operating on the theory that the child secretly took the baby out to the hallway and dropped it down a four-story chute without telling the other family members. But detectives said they were investigating whether other family members had a role.

 

Ms. Perry told the police that she was away when the child was born.

 

The girl was accompanied by a young friend named Heidi when she delivered, friends of Heidi said.

 

They said Heidi used to meet the 12-year-old every morning at 7:30 to go to school. Heidi had not been found yesterday, but her friends said she was still in the complex, staying in another apartment.

 

Neighbors Are Skeptical

 

Some neighbors doubted that the girl had tried to kill her baby. The police say that the infant was dropped down the garbage chute just before the trash was drawn into the compactor, but the neighbors said the girl had to have been too weak to do that.

 

"She was staggering, holding her stomach, when she went to school," said a neighbor. "She looked terrible. She could barely walk."

 

The girl showed up for class and slumped forward on her desk, telling teachers she was sick, friends said.

 

"She refused to admit that she had given birth once she lost the baby," said a friend of the family. "It was if she could not comprehend it."

 

Gladys Perry seemed less able to fathom the birth than her adoptive daughter. She fainted when she learned, on the evening news, how large the baby was, 6 pounds, 10 ounces, friends who were with her said.

 

"She said she did not know she was pregnant," said a friend. "She was stunned to hear that she had delivered a full-term infant."

 

"From everything we've been able to find out," Sergeant Stoecker said, "no one seemed to know. Even Clarence says she didn't know during the pregnancy. You got to live it to believe it."

"

[Remmie]

Didn't realise John Cena was in the Wire before he got in shape:

 

[KMD7]

 

[KMD7]

 

[Carvalho Diablo]

Just started watching The Wire. Flew through series 1 and really enjoyed it, 2 episodes into series 2 atm

[KMD7]

5 minutes ago, Carvalho Diablo said:

Just started watching The Wire. Flew through series 1 and really enjoyed it, 2 episodes into series 2 atm

Bit of a change of pace and direction in season 2 mate but I assure you it's great. You're lucky, I'd love to start watching it for the first time again. 

[lifetime fan]

Season 2 is my favourite. 

[Kevin D]

9 hours ago, Carvalho Diablo said:

Just started watching The Wire. Flew through series 1 and really enjoyed it, 2 episodes into series 2 atm

 

Well sir, you are about to see one of the great wonders in life and my band's name:

 

 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

A relative of Avon? 

 

https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2021/01/17/safe-streets-dante-barksdale-man-shot-killed-in-southeast-baltimore-sunday-morning/

[lifetime fan]

Just found out the Deacon (“a good church man is always up in everyone’s shit. It’s how we do”) was the real life Avon Barksdale. 
 

 

 

[Kevin D]

On 23/12/2018 at 06:42, Kevin D said:

 

Rawls: You bend over for us, or I swear to God, I'll spend what's left of my career shitting on anybody in your department.

 

Bunny: My people saw this as a tactical deployment. The responsibility is mine and mine alone.

 

Burrell: Well, you won't fall alone. Unless you fall exactly the way we tell you to.

 

Rawls: You go to retirement services and file at a lieutenant's grade, that's right, you're busted back. We can't take your OEEOD away, but you're not going out with a Major's pension.

 

Bunny: I can retire right now, with my 30, before you bust me. I got vacation time alone, to make my 30.

 

Burrell: Fuck your vacation time. You're out. Today. At the lower grade.

 

Bunny: That's against the goddamn contract!

 

Rawls: What part of bend over didn't you understand?

 

On 12/07/2017 at 23:07, Kevin D said:

McNulty: How is your wife taking your retirement?

 

Colvin: Well she's lost 20lbs and got herself a real estate licence, so I guess she's fixin to leave me.

 

 

 

[Kevin D]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/03/26/baltimore-reducing-prosecutions/

 

By 

Tom Jackman

 

Tom Jackman

Reporter covering criminal justice locally and nationally

 

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March 26, 2021 at 12:00 p.m. GMT

Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

 

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

Homicides rose 30 percent in 2020, survey of 34 U.S. cities finds

So on Friday, Mosby made her temporary steps permanent. She announced Baltimore City will continue to decline prosecution of all drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic and misdemeanor cases, and will partner with a local behavioral health service to aggressively reach out to drug users, sex workers and people in psychiatric crisis to direct them into treatment rather than the back of a patrol car.

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“A year ago, we underwent an experiment in Baltimore,” Mosby said in an interview, describing steps she took after consulting with public health and state officials to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus, including not prosecuting nonviolent offenses. “What we learned in that year, and it’s so incredibly exciting, is there’s no public safety value in prosecuting these low-level offenses. These low-level offenses were being, and have been, discriminately enforced against Black and Brown people.

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” In a city that still struggles with a high homicide rate and gun violence, even with the decline in crime, she said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of misdemeanor court.

The pandemic accelerated an effort already underway by liberal prosecutors across the country to reduce or eliminate the prosecution of minor crimes. Not long after the coronavirus hit, prosecutors in Seattle and Brooklyn announced they would not pursue low-level offenses that don’t jeopardize public safety. In Washington state last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s drug possession law was unconstitutional because it didn’t account for the defendant’s intent. King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said he already wasn’t pursuing such cases “because we did no good for people struggling with substance abuse disorder.”

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In California, prosecutors in Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties have recently stopped taking people to court for drug possession and low-level misdemeanors. “The data suggests,” newly elected Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said in an email, “that the bulk of misdemeanor caseloads — which represent the vast majority of filings in the United States — involve the prosecution of cases with minimal, and often negative, long-term impacts on public safety. It’s this reality that led to my policy prohibiting the filing of many first time low-level misdemeanors.”

But a number of legal experts said they had not seen an effort like Mosby’s in which behavioral health services were actively brought into the mix from the outset of cases. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) issued a statement Friday lauding Mosby for “working with partners to stem violence in Baltimore and ensure residents have the adequate support services they deserve.”

But Sean Kennedy, a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute who studies and has written about Baltimore crime and arrest data, said forgoing the prosecutions of low-level crimes is a mistake in a city he called the “murder capital of America.”

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“These ‘quality of life’ violations are more than a nuisance, they are precursors and directly proximate to much more serious and often violent crimes,” Kennedy said, referring to offenses such as human trafficking and drug-related shootings. Kennedy said Mosby dismisses violent crime cases “at record rates, rarely secures prison time for gun offenders and has presided over the largest rise in homicides in decades.”

Mosby said her policy decision is unrelated to a federal investigation of her and her husband’s personal and campaign finances. The initial changes in prosecution policy occurred a year ago, and their success caused her to make them permanent, she said.

The decision not to prosecute drug and nonviolent misdemeanor crimes meant a huge paradigm shift for police, Commissioner Michael Harrison said in an interview. Officers who made drug arrests saw prosecutors dismissing the charges at the jail, and so the arrests mainly stopped. Mosby said there were 80 percent fewer arrests for drug possession in Baltimore in the past year.

 

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison at an introductory news conference after joining the department in 2019. He was skeptical of proposed prosecution changes but admits the early results are positive. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

“The officers told me they did not agree with that paradigm shift,” Harrison said. He said he had to “socialize” both officers and citizens to this new approach. Harrison expected crime to rise. “It did not,” the chief said. “It continued to go down through 2020. As a practitioner, as an academic, I can say there’s a correlation between the fact that we stopped making these arrests and crime did not go up,” though he cautioned that the coronavirus could have had some impact. Mosby noted that the virus did not keep crime from rising in nearly every other big U.S. city last year. Even with its progress, Baltimore had 335 homicides in 2020 and killings are up in the first months of this year.

Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades

Harrison enthusiastically supported Mosby’s move to sign an agreement with Baltimore Crisis Response Inc., a private nonprofit group that provides services to people with mental health and substance use disorders. With the police, BCRI will launch a 911 alternative dispatch where calls for behavioral health issues are routed to BCRI, which can send a two-person mobile crisis team to a scene or immediately refer people to services. The state’s attorney’s office is also collaborating with three Baltimore groups that offer a variety of services to sex workers.

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Social workers are “better suited to deal with these issues,” Harrison said. “For generations, we’ve been asked to be all things to all people. That never should have happened.”

The head of the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police union did not return messages seeking comment.

Edgar K. Wiggins, executive director of BCRI, said that his agency taking a more immediate role in public response “gives us a conduit into a population that, honestly, we’ve not always had access to, and they haven’t had access to us.” He said mobile response teams will have a mental health professional and a registered nurse because “these folks often haven’t managed their health.” Immediate referrals for sex workers can be effective because “more often than not they have problems with substance use disorder and addictions. We want to divert people from involvement in the criminal justice system, which is not going to be helpful for their chronic problems.”

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Mosby and others said that the racial justice protests of last summer provided further momentum for the need to revamp the justice system. Kobi Little, head of the Baltimore NAACP, said Mosby had been “responsive to the community’s needs and to calls for equity.” He said the new approach has led to “reduced policing and incarceration of Black people, increased access to crisis services” and “reduction in violent crime.”

Mosby asked public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University to examine the effect of her March 2020 policy shifts on public calls for police service and on rearrests of those who had charges dropped or warrants quashed. The number of 911 calls for drug or intoxication situations dropped from 131 per day before the pandemic to 88 per day in the eight months between March and December last year. Calls for prostitution or sex work dropped from six per day to three per day, the Johns Hopkins researchers found. The number of 911 calls for violent crimes did not drop significantly in the same period.

They also found that of 1,431 people who had charges or warrants dismissed at the outset, only five were rearrested. Though studies of recidivism typically look at three years to review data on repeat offenders, the fact that only five reentered the system in eight months is “pretty unbelievable,” said Susan G. Sherman, a behavioral health professor at Johns Hopkins who specializes in helping marginalized populations. “In a world where drug decriminalization is happening around the country, the impact on the community is important,” Sherman said, and Mosby “really values having an understanding of these impacts.”

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A number of big-city prosecutors have moved to decriminalize drugs, and Oregon voters decriminalized small amounts of drugs statewide. Miriam Krinsky, head of Fair and Just Prosecution, which advocates for liberal prosecutors, said many prosecutors are now getting their communities to treat drug abuse as a public health problem rather than a crime problem. “At a minimum, the criminal justice system needs to get out of the way and do no harm,” Krinsky said. “It’s been doing harm for decades. We need to stop trying to punish our way out of it.”

Mosby noted that 13 percent of the American population is Black, but 35 percent of those incarcerated for drug violations are Black. “As a prosecutor, our mission is justice over convictions,” Mosby said. “You have to understand the importance of rectifying the wrongs of the past.”

Millicent Wagner understands that. She said she spent years as a drug addict and prostitute on the streets of Baltimore before going sober and reuniting with her family more than two years ago. But she still had an outstanding prostitution warrant from 2018. Last fall, she reached out to Mosby’s office after hearing of the new policy, and records show it quickly dismissed her case.

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Trying to resolve her warrant the old way — surrendering at the jail, possibly going into custody, waiting 30 days for a hearing — “would have devastated my child. It would have hurt him the most. It would hurt me, too. Just having to be back in the Baltimore city jail, all those things I’ve been staying away from.” Instead of being back in the system, she is getting a state identification card that she wouldn’t apply for with an outstanding warrant, plus a Social Security card, and then a job.

“I think this could help a lot of people in my situation that have turned themselves around,” Wagner said. “It’s hard.”

[Kevin D]

Rawls is my favourite character, always partial to a magnificent bastard: