The Wire

3. The System Is Broken

Chapter 3 The System Is Broken 63 Look, they gonna tear this building down, they gonna build up some new shit. But people? They don’t give a fuck about people. Bodie Broadus, “Time After Time” The pursuit of profits over people, and of career advancement over substantive results, is one of the series’ themes, and its effect is traced across a number of parallel institutions: the police department, the drug-trafficking organization, political governance structures, the school system, and the media. The Wire shows the common dysfunction across these locations, systems in which those with power use it to protect their own interests and those without are victims of structures they can neither perceive nor resist. The Wire demonstrates the way that neoliberalism’s colonization of social life creates a context for public service in which performance statistics dominate over any other criterion of job performance, even when those statistics demonstrably do not reflect meaningful results. Police officers , school administrators, and politicians work to manipulate the system to serve their own ends, just like drug dealers. Sea- 64 Chapter 3 64 son two ends with the dissolution of the union, which has been charged with corruption: federal prosecutors have no interest in pursuing the trafficking in women and drugs, but are interested only in prosecuting waterfront corruption and removing the union as a political obstacle. In season three, Colvin loses his job as a consequence of Hamsterdam after being demoted so that he also loses a larger pension, and the stigma prevents him from being hired as security guard at Johns Hopkins University , which was to have been his post-police work. As in most of The Wire’s story lines, those who challenge the status quo and work for systemic change are punished and disempowered while those who think only of their own advancement prosper. The police department is the most obvious target of this theme of institutional failure, and, as I have already argued, one of the most significant ways that The Wire revises the police drama format is in its refusal to depict the closing of cases, even if there are arrests, as victories for justice. The entwined problems of crime and poverty have systemic causes and can only be addressed by systemic solutions. Not only does the series repeatedly dramatize the fact that arrests do not substantively change anything, but at times it further suggests that police intervention actually makes things worse in the absence of other, more encompassing solutions. For example, the progress Cutty makes with troubled youth in his gym during season three (the advent of Hamsterdam means they are not needed as lookouts anymore) is mostly undone when the neighborhood is razed and they return to the street corners—although a minor glimmer of hope remains in the brief appearances of Justin (Justin Burley), among the more troubled of his students, still in the gym in the subsequent season and in the example of Cutty, who is able to build a life beyond the drug trade. When Avon is arrested a second time at the end of season three, this clears the way for Marlo’s unchallenged dominance, creating an even more predatory culture. Repeatedly we are shown the inefficacy of a police department that cares more about protecting peo- 65 The System Is Broken 65 ple’s careers than about protecting the communities it is meant to serve. The most significant results it produces, ironically, are Carcetti’s election to mayor (based on a scandal regarding a witness shooting that is later proven to be accidental) and later to governor (based on the press coverage of the serial killer faked by McNulty and Freamon). The first season constructs parallels between the drug enterprise and the police department, often through intercut scenes, demonstrating that in each those lower in the hierarchy must find ways to accommodate the at-times capricious demands of those above and reinforcing a sense that the drug enterprise is, from the point of view of many involved, merely employment . In each site, numbers drive goals, seemingly a reasonable expectation for a sales enterprise like the drug trade but one that hinders legitimate investigative work when applied to the police department. The Wire shares with Homicide the focus on “the board” where murders appear in black or red, designating closed or open cases, with the clearance rate used to evaluate detectives.1 In Homicide, the board was...