Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III believes that David Simon’s hit HBO show The Wire serves as a “smear that will take [the city] decades to overcome.”
David Simon responds, saying “The Wire owes no apologies — at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern.”
