DRUG WAR GOES PRIME TIME

HBO's The Wire Goes Against Stereotype

Sergeant Joe Friday would probably flip in his fictional grave at the sight
of HBO's new cop show, which just concluded its first season last month.

The Wire looks at the war on drugs as it is waged in the inner cities of
Baltimore by an inter-agency team of federal agents and local police
officers. The cop genre has come a long way from the strait-laced corn
served up on Dragnet, the mother of all TV police dramas, but The Wire may
be pioneering a sub-genre of its own. Created by David Simon, a former
reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and co-written by ex-police officer Ed
Burns, The Wire challenges some of the core assumptions that underlie the
typical cop show.

While most such series allude to the broader politics that drive law
enforcement, Wire takes the next step. Here the agencies are portrayed not
as zealous guardians of the public good, but rather as political entities
pursuing their vested interests -- whose actions often have unjust and cruel
consequences. As Simon told Salon magazine when the series debuted in June,
"Once you're at war, you have an enemy. Once you have an enemy, you can do
whatever you want. . .I'm not supportive of the idea of drugs, but what
drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has."

Here is the story set-up in brief: D'Angelo Barksdale, a young lieutenant in
a large Baltimore drug organization run by his uncle, Avon Barksdale, is
acquitted on a homicide charge after the star witness is intimidated into
recanting her story. Detective James McNulty is brought in by the presiding
judge to assess just how the case went south and finds out that the
Barksdales appear to be linked to quite a few murders. The deputy
commissioner then calls for a task force to wipe out Barksdale's operation;
it includes federal agents, the tenacious McNulty, hot-shot undercover cop
Shakima Greggs and another savvy detective, Bunk Morehead.

Corrupt cops, burnt-out cops, even homicidal cops are not new in Hollywood.
But The Wire is different in that we see how department politics affect the
execution of the drug war. The series makes clear, for example, that the
task force is intended as a public relations measure after the botched
homicide prosecution. "Keep the papers off it, make an arrest or two,"
directs one higher-up.

The policemen also don't always show great commitment to their job. Two
officers balk and get testy with McNulty when he dispatches them to
cross-check some records, a basic, ground-floor tactic in a thorough
investigation.

Kevin Zeese, founder of Common Sense for Drug Policy, welcomes the show's
realism about the conduct of the war on drugs.

All these shows with a more realistic portrayal open the conversation to a
more sensible level of discourse about the issue instead of one based on
emotion," he says. Traffic, the surprise Hollywood blockbuster directed by
Steven Soderbergh, did portray the futility of the drug war. But Zeese says,
"It didn't show how blacks are treated differently by the criminal justice
system at every step of the way."

What is most unusual about The Wire is that the series depicts both sides of
the drug war. Darnell M. Hunt, professor of sociology, says The Wire takes
an unconventional approach to its depictions of African- Americans. Hunt,
who is also Director of the UCLA Department of African-American Studies, and
is conducting a five-year study of the depictions of African-Americans on
prime-time television, loves the show.

"It's rare to see African-American characters portrayed across the spectrum
like that. . .I am struck by the nuanced, very interesting portrayals," he
says.

The law enforcement task force is racially mixed. McNulty (played by Dominic
West) is Irish- American, while his colleagues Greggs (Sonja Sohn),
Morehead,(Wendall Pierce), and Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) are
African-Americans. Greggs is revealed as a lesbian when she arrives home and
is greeted by her sweetheart, who is also African-American. Morehead is a
genial and dedicated veteran, while Daniels is a careerist, for whom the
badge often trumps race. When two white members of the task force get
liquored up and harass and humiliate the African-American residents, Daniels
advises them get their story straight to avoid an investigation. "He did not
piss you off," he says of the black teenager the two cops beat up. "He made
you fear for your safety and that of your fellow officers."

And the people selling the drugs are just as complex and fully drawn. "Even
the quote-unquote bad characters are humanized in ways you don't usually see
on television," Hunt says. "This show just strikes me as being the most
balanced and realistic portrayal of people involved in drug culture."

We watch D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard, Jr.) as his qualms about the violence of
his trade increase; we see his Uncle Avon (Wood Harris) in an apron as he
cooks at a community event and cuddles D'Angelo's toddler son. "In one
episode, we saw one of the (drug syndicate) lieutenants in the organization
going off to a junior college to take a business management course," Hunt
says. "It was to get better at managing his drug business, but it was an
unexpected twist, there was a feeling of reality about it."

The series also makes clear the fact that a drug economy is the logical
outcome of the overwhelming problems facing the inner cities. Series creator
Simons told Salon that the government has created "war zones where the only
economic engine is the self-perpetuating drug trade. . .they've spent 34
years taking neighborhoods and basically divesting them from the rest of
America. We've embraced a permanent war of attrition against the underclass,
and it can't work."

Some critics have given the show low marks for racism, nonetheless, noting
that almost all the drug dealers are black.

"Most drug dealers are white, many people in the drug trade are white, and
if you didn't already know that, you wouldn't know it from watching the
show," says Hunt. But in defense of the series, Hunt says the plot is based
on the real-life case of a drug organization and its young leader in
Washington DC.

The Wire's shortcomings, however, are important because the view of
African-Americans is still defined by media images. "In an ideal world we'd
have enough variety in representations out there that no one show would have
to represent the racial experience," Hunt says.

So while The Wire's unconventional approach to writing and depiction of the
mixed motives of the drug warriors make it a landmark show, its failings
reveal just how much further we still need to go.