The Wire’s David Simon on Drugs, Cops and TV

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heat as

(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. I'm very excited

(00:45):
about my guest today. It's David Simon, and many of
you will know his name because he was the creator
or co creator with Edward Burns of The Wire, that
fantastic TV showing to HBO in the early two thousand's,
but about the drug war and about the drug world
in Baltimore. He's got a new show out on HBO

(01:08):
called We Own This City and it's in a way, uh,
not a sequel. I think he's called it a sort
of coda to the Wire, but also going back into
Baltimore about the drug trade, about police and police corruption.
So David, listen, Thanks so much for joining me on Psychoactives.
You and I we've never met, but I feel like

(01:30):
we've been sort of parallel tracks, and so I'm gonna
be sharing stuff about my own life that you don't know.
First all we sharing common where we're two bald, white
guys who grew up in the suburbs, whose fathers were,
as you call it, professional Jews right as yours worked
for the Jewish social service organization but a brith mine
was a rabbi, and who have been passionate for our

(01:51):
entire adult life about ending the drug war and drug prohibition.
So let me just start by asking you why did
this become on such a significant part and passion of
your life. Well, I wasn't passionate about it for my
whole life, Um, I would say I acquired some on
the ground awareness of what the drug war was accomplishing

(02:14):
and what it wasn't because they made me the police
reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the city of Baltimore.
That was a happenstance. I I was. I wanted to
go into journalism. I was I wanted to be a newspaperman,
and I happen to get hired and they put me
on the entry level beat of night police reporter. Uh.
And it was in this remarkably drug saturated city of Baltimore,

(02:36):
where the drug war was in full force and would
actually ratchet up several times while I was there, And
so I sort of experienced the drug war UM as
an observer. I wasn't particularly interested in in the subject
matter until it became my beat. I didn't have a
lot of experience or interest in drugs themselves. I mean, I,
you know, smoked some weed and tried some things here

(02:58):
and there, but it was it was not I was.
I had no devotional interest in in UM altered states,
and this was just pure journalistic uh. Interesting and then
having the beat, I you know, at first, I was
just interested in how the war was progressing. I was
covering it as the facts on the ground. But there
came a point at which I started to realize that
the policy itself was problematic. Did you find ways, you

(03:22):
think in your reporting for the Baltimore Sun. I mean,
the drug war was really beginning to go crazy in
the eighties when you're covering it and the early nineties,
did you find ways to put in your critical approach
to this stuff? In the reporting it was it just
impossible or was it somewhat possible, but you weren't thinking
to do it at quite yet at that point, I
think I probably got there when I got there, which
is to say in the beginning, you know, I mean

(03:43):
you got Remember I was twenty twenty one years old
when I started writing for the newspaper and twenty two
when they put me on that beat about the turn
twenty three, and in the beginning, you're just sort of
like trying to keep up with what happened yesterday. So
you know, you're talking, you're talking to hops. You know,
you don't have a lot of sources on the street.
So when they put dope on the table, when they say,

(04:04):
you know, this happened in the Southeast District today, we
we seized, you know, this much dope and it's got
a street value of X and we've got three guns
with it, and they put it all on the table.
You know, it's news. It's just it's it's it's what
happened yesterday. So you're just in the beginning, you're just
reporting without context. But you're learning, you know, you're learning
to require sources and people who might you know, let

(04:25):
you buy them a beer and talk to you, you know,
law enforcement. But everything was sort of at a surface
level because you're young and it's a new beat, and
you're just you know, just hey, what happened yesterday? And
can I get a byline? Um And there came a point,
i'd say, four years into me covering the beat, when
I was in my you know, it was probably about

(04:46):
when they gave me an assignment to um do sort
of a history on this one drug trafficker who had
had a legendary career in Baltimore going back to the
your only nineteen sixties, little Melvin Melvin Williams. And I
tried to find out everything I could about this. He
had just fallen for his third major charge. He had
gone to jail in sixty seven, he'd gone to jail

(05:06):
again in seventy five. He was now back at in
eighty four, and he had gotten caught up in a
in a federal case. And he was really a character,
I mean, and sort of a guy who had cut
a wide swath in Baltimore. And so I learned everything
I could about him, and eventually he started talking to
me from he was in Louisburg, penitentiary, and I got
invited up to sort of for him to pontificate on

(05:28):
his life, and it ended up being a long series
of articles and and in talking to Melvin, I started
to have doubts about the advocacy of the drug war
and about what had replaced him, because in some respects
UM arresting him had been as about a meaningful prosecution
as you could have. He'd done a lot of damage,
but it also had almost no effect on the on

(05:51):
the street culture of drugs in Baltimore, as no arrest
seems to ever, you know, in the long run. UM. Obviously,
arresting people for drug related violence is elemental and necessary,
but trying to inhibit the drug trade through a rat
the power of arrests seems to be problematic. So that
was the first moment. And then as I proceeded down
a pace, you know, I started to look at what

(06:12):
it was going wrong inside the police department. And I
would say, just before I left the paper, by then
I had I had come to the conclusion that UM
drug enforcement was actually destroying law enforcement was destroying policing.
I don't think anyone was arguing that anywhere that I
was reading, but I was seeing it for my eyes
in terms of what it was doing to the Baltimore
Police Department and the State's Attorney's office to an extent.

(06:33):
So I I started, let me say, because I mean,
you know, for me, I mean just you know, back
in the eighties, I'm a graduate stender at Harvard. I
get myself into the State departments Arcotics Bureau. I get
some clearances, and I go and interviewed d e A
and Customs and FBI and c I agents and all
this all around the world, Latin American, Europe, and it
was kind of in the system, and I'm seeing how

(06:55):
stupid the whole damn thing is. But what I'm also
aware of is when I write my dissertation and books
about this, I lean over backwards to be fair to
these d A guys, even though I think what they're
doing is just like the prohibition agents of old. Now
to flashforward, you know, some years ago, maybe late nineties,
early two thousands, the former executive editor of The New

(07:17):
York Times, Max Frankel, writes a not bet in The Times,
and he says it's time for media, for the reporters
to cover the drug war the same way that that
Vietnam reporters finally began to cover the Vietnam War the
way that David halber stammard, he'll shade and those guys
to be critical, right, So it's a kind of a
calling out right. But at the same time, what I've

(07:38):
also heard people say is that when you're a police reporter,
when you're covering crime, you depend on those cops as
your sources, and if you start writing critical stuff about
them while you're covering it, you lose your sources, you
lose your access. If there's a kind of building contradiction
between covering the drug war in a critical way as
a daily reporter and maintaining your ability to function, and

(08:00):
I went, I didn't have that problem. I have to
say I didn't have that problem at all in the
sense that I got to know a lot of cops,
and some of them were abiding drug warriors. And certainly
if somebody was like running the d e A Office
field office in Baltimore, or somebody was the head of
an oar Cotact unit, I didn't expect any real introspection

(08:20):
about what they were doing, or any real you know,
self awareness or self critique about about policy coming from them.
That's not where you get. I mean, if you make
a bunch of sources, if you if you work the
beat hard, you eventually find the cops who are being
a little bit thoughtful about what they're accomplishing and what
they're not because they can't help us see it. And
and what I would credit is I found a lot

(08:42):
of cops, some some really smart, who said this is
screwed up, and you know, we were not only we're
not winning, we're not you know, we're undercutting what we
claimed to be. And they became insightful to me. Some
of the best anti drug war sources I ever got
were cops who are fighting the drugs. No, no, I
mean in that sense. I when I was interviewing the

(09:04):
d e A guys who was the same thing. There
were guys who were total ideologues, and there were guys
whould just lie their asses off to me. But then
there were people who are just cynical and just saying
it's just a job, it's just to be like any
other police work, and there'll be a job from my
kid one day. And then there are others who were
privately in favor of legalization. I'm not I'm not with
you on the cynical I mean I I like, I

(09:24):
met some cynics who were like, yeah, this is it's
just what I'm doing today. But but the guys who
were the best sources, who were who were really insightful
about it, were bothered um and they were and they
were trying to amend their priorities as best as they
could within the system. Some of them were saying, look,
I'm not interested in work in drug cases. I mean,
the best guy I ever had, the best source I
ever had, and I later ended up writing television with him,

(09:47):
was Ed Burns, who was a homicide detective. But he
would do these complex or nate wire taps that involved
targeting of violent drug gangs in Baltimore that we're responsible
for multiple murders. And he chose the targets because as
they were responsible for multiple murders, he could not fix
the overlay that was drug prohibition and that was not
you know, I wasn't in his bailo Wick. He was

(10:09):
one detective from from Baltimore, Maryland. But he could look
at where all the bodies were dropping and save the
LEXA and terrorist projects and target that group that was
you know, busy killing people as a matter of business,
and he could remove them, and in removing them, he
could reduce the murder rate. And and you know, in fact,
there was one wonderful story he told me about after

(10:30):
they pulled all these guys out of Lexan and Harrison
and after they had been this terrible drug war and
eight six, and they basically walked through the projects. They
walked up and down the stairwells. The cops did um
and they said, you know, you see, you're also still
selling drugs here. We know that, but nobody's shooting anybody.
And if if you can figure out how not to
keep shooting, you know, and not to shoot everybody, we

(10:51):
won't be back for a while. In a sense, they
were saying, harm reduction is like, can you guys figure
out how to sell this ship without killing each other?
And when you can't, we have to come and address that.
And so that was a very sort of sophistic for
n That was a very sophisticated message to be putting out.
But of course they were not. That was not the
commander of the homicide unit. I'm sorry that their connection

(11:12):
or the d A Field Office people that that was.
That was a homicide detective who was looking at murders.
So there were people who were laying in the cut,
so to speak, who were very smart about the drug war,
and they were not cynical. They were trying to do
the best police work under the circumstances they could well.
So when you step back from reporting, right and just
to you know, inform the audience, right. So David, you know,

(11:35):
basically begins to take a leave from reporting, and first
as this intensive investigation of the police, writes a book
that becomes a TV series called Homicide, highly regarded, then
goes and does The Corner with Ed Burns, which is
another incredible book, very highly regarded, also becomes a TV
I think mini series. And I think these two things

(11:56):
kind of come together to help you produce you know,
The Wire in the early two thousands in a way
on the one hand looking at the cops and other
hand looking at people selling drugs on the street in
that whole world. But what you're very much doing is
very much in the tradition of drug ethnography. And when
you wrote The Corner, you credited a book by Elliott Libau,
who in their early sixties wrote a book Tally's Corner

(12:18):
about street corner life in d C. But there was
Ed Preble was the guide father of drug ethnographers, did
an articles called Taking Care of Bigness. And there was
Mike Agar Philippe Bougua, who I don't know if you've
heard about a crup, but I had him on episodes
who did in Search of Respect and righteous? Don't think
where He's spent many years immersed in these communities, and
in some ways Sam canonists right with Dreamland at least

(12:39):
of us, although he comes to different conclusions than you
and I do on the drug war. But when you
start to immerse yourself right in this street life, in
this world, to feel like a fundamental sort of freedom
from the demands of reporting, that you're able able to
go deeper, and do you see yourself in perceptions changing
in fundamental way when you do that, first with the

(13:01):
cops and then with people in the drug world. Yeah.
I graduated from daily reporting to doing project work in
criminal justice and that was those were my later years
at the sun UM. But while I was at the
sun I took leaves of absence to be able to
do sort of stand around and watch journalism. One year
in the homicide unit, following shifted detectives and you sort
of see the mass assembly line that is death investigation

(13:23):
in a violent city. And then the second book was
I went to a random drug corner with that this
sort of drug saturated neighbor, and we met this broken
We'd started meeting people randomly, but eventually we settled on
this very broken nuclear family of mother, father son who
were utterly engaged by the drug culture there. And the
second book, by the time I got ready to do

(13:44):
the Corner, My, My, My, reporting the Sun had brought
me to the point. In fact, I've already written that
piece about that piece about the what had gone wrong
in the police. Barm basically said, you're emphasizing drug arrests,
and you're emphasizing mass arrest and you're emphasizing drug prohibition,
and you're not doing police work anymore. You're not responding
to murders, robberts, robbery's rapes. You know, you know, a

(14:05):
felony is no longer a felony, But you guys can
go in everybody's pockets at the corner of you know,
Mountain Fayett. What are you doing? And so it was
a critique of police priorities that that that's serious. So
even even when I left the paper to do the
Corner as a as a leave of absence, I already
had grave doubts about what the drug war was doing.
But now I got to experience it from me from

(14:25):
the other side, from the people being policed, and you
could see how disassociative and how destructive this police department
attempting to be an army of occupation was. They weren't
making the neighborhood safer. They were just harvesting stats in
the neighborhood, and they were and they were losing their
credibility one arrest at a time, or want failure to
arrest at a time in some ways with the people

(14:47):
who lived there, and so a few and few of
people were talking to them. Nothing was getting accomplished, and
everyone was getting paid, but nothing was getting better. It's
getting worse. So the Corner Will actually allowed me to
see it from a perspective that wasn't you know you
were You weren't kicking in the door with the police.
You were basically with the people whose doors were being
kicked in. By the way, it did not give me

(15:08):
any regard for drugs. If you think I'm benign about
the presence of drugs in American society, particularly in this
era of of oxygen fent and and all that. I mean,
I've lost too many people. I mean everybody, I everybody
I walked behind in the corner just about is gone,
and far too many of them from from overdose deaths.
You know. The headline today as we're talking in early May,

(15:31):
is that the Center Disease Controls just announced that more
people died of a drug overdose in the past year
than ever before, over a hundred thousand people. And it's
more than all the gun deaths and motor vehicle deaths
put together, plus an extra you know, tens of thousands.
And one of the people who died was the actor
Michael Kay Williams, who played Omar, you know, the kind

(15:53):
of charismatic figure and the Wire who Obama and many
others that was their favorite character and really extraordinary. And
at one point I think I saw Michael Williams talk
about how in his own struggles that the intensity of
being in the Wire as an actor would sometimes bring
on a relapse for him. And I just say, if
what more can you say about your relationship with Michael

(16:14):
Williams um, Michael struggled. We had a point at which
he actually came to production and was very honest about
the struggle he was having. We export with him what
that meant and what he wanted, I mean, did he
need to step back from the show, um, and from
the role and and instead what he said was no,

(16:35):
he needs to do He needed to work, He needed
to orient himself around around the work. And we actually
one of the guys in the production became basically the
the good angel on his shoulder and stayed with him
and stayed with him all the time in Baltimore and
and basically pulled him through. This was probably a moment
in season three of the show, of the five year

(16:55):
run of the show, so that when Michael was working,
we stopped worrying about and Michael stopped, I think worrying
about relapse because he had some guardian angels around him.
We obviously couldn't do that with somebody's somebody's life, you know,
uh and infiniteum. I always worried about Mike. Mike was
an incredibly gentle spirit who took a lot of stuff

(17:19):
to heart and and felt like nobody else I ever experienced.
He was really smart, he was really attuned to his
own heart, his own pain, but he had, you know,
he was attempted. And I think, you know, Um, I
don't think I'm saying anything that wasn't in a toxicology report.

(17:41):
I mean, I think, you know, if you want me,
if you want me to say it bluntly, he did
those things to himself, you know, and he had he
had helped from the goddamn Sacklers, you know. I mean,
there's nothing that has proven more lethal than um, then
the whole oxy revolution, and and now fatal in the
idea of these synthetic opiates that are just own people
murdering them um for profit, and and the fact that

(18:05):
it's complicit with people who are taking them, sometimes taking
them for pain roll, you know, as part of pain
pain regiments. But nonetheless, the power of these drugs is
such that the dosage can be incredibly vulnerable. Although you know, David,
it is I mean, the Sacklers deserve eternal damnation for
what they did. But it's also true that the crackdown
on oxy content probably held catapult first the spirit of

(18:28):
heroin and then fentanyl, and you know, over those fatalities
have increased maybe fivefold, since the peak of the thing.
So on one hand and going, but the FINITYL thing is,
you know, it's a different thing. Oh, I know is
when people were um shooting street heroin or storting storting
street heroin or coca, they weren't dying in these numbers.
There is something extraordinary about what the lab has done. Yeah,

(18:51):
in the case of Federal, we're not talking about legally
produced fentinyl coming out of you know, but what we're
talking about the revolution that is basically synthetic at n
and and it's basically taking the drugs to another level.
M Yeah. And also a dynamic of prohibition. It's the
economics of prohibition. I don't care when it's hard to
crack down, you shift in that direction, right, I agree

(19:12):
with that. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not suggesting that UM
prohibitions are way out of that nightmare. But I am
suggesting that a lot more money should be attendant on
the treatment and on the on the intervention at the
human level of synthetic drugs and what they're doing even
even to the attic population. Right, But it also calls

(19:32):
for bolder solutions when you're dealing with death or stemming
from an unregulated adulterated drug supply were fentanyls showing up
not just as pure you know, fentanyl, but mixed in
with other opioids and now stimulant drugs and everything else. Um,
it calls for bolder solutions, which is why I've admired
the fact that you know, you haven't pulled your punches.
You know you've called not it's not just about the

(19:52):
drug war, it's about drug prohibition and about the need
for a fundamentally different strategy. Well, I mean, but I'm
I'm I'm basically result based, which is to say, if
you could have shown me that the draconian mass arrest
of drug users or even drug sellers had resulted in
lower levels of addiction, lower levels of drug purity, that um,

(20:13):
there were less drug corners in my city than there
than there are now. If you could have shown me
any progress, we could have had an argument. I could said, well, yeah,
it's really draconian. And you locked up a hundred thousand
people in Barnmore last year, and you've ruined a lot
of lives, and you've made criminal histories out of just
everybody between the age of you know, fifteen and twenty
five and congratulations, But yeah, you know, the out of
population has been diminished, and drugs are less available and

(20:35):
the purity is less. We could have an argument about
whether the draconian use of law enforcement had done anything. Instead,
everything's worse. And then I look across the aisle and
I say, what's the clearance rates for murder and for
robbery and for rape, for assault? Is my city more
or less livable? And Baltimore is now the most violent city,

(20:56):
one of the most violent cities in America. It's the
most violent it has ever been in modern history. You're
arresting half the number of people you used to arrest
for doing actual crimes against people. That police work has
died because there's no money in it. There's money and
grabbing everybody off the corner and throwing them into the
courthouse for no reason. That's how you get paid and
promoted as a police officer in Baltimore, Maryland. So that

(21:20):
part of it, you know, it's like I'm just you know,
just show me what you've accomplished, and show me what
you failed to accomplish, and I'll make a decision on
based on whether you're gonna keep doing this or not.
It'll be coaching. You know, that's my feeling on that
stupid crime makes for stupid cops. And there is no
there's nothing complex about an open air drug market. There's

(21:40):
just nothing. It's you know, crawl outside of a vacant
row house in Baltimore. You know, look down at your corner,
um watch for ten minutes, and you know who's working
with ground stash. Pull the wagon up. You know, you
could actually arrest at the right people if you want it,
or you don't even bother to do that, because what
does the Fourth Amendment mean in Baltimore anymore? Just jump
out on the corner, give this ground stash to the
guy standing close to it. Every you know, you make

(22:01):
your stats, they go to the courthouse. You get paid
because when you have to show up at court the
next morning. You know, when you're're working on four to
twelve the night before, you now in overtime. So you're
gonna get paid more than the guy who sits on
his post and tries to figure out who's been robbing
people in armed robberies or who's been breaking into the
churches and stealing stuff out of the churches. That guy,
you know, if he works that problem for a week

(22:23):
and a half, two weeks, three weeks, maybe gets one
arrest a month, and it goes into the computers and
one arrest. The other guy's got forty fifty sixty seventy
arrest loitering in a drug free zone, you know, distribution,
you know, possession with intent possession. He gets paid, the
other guy doesn't get paid. And then some some idiot
and planning in research who's trying to like assess who

(22:45):
should be promoted to sergeant or he goes to the
guy with forty ARUs is you know, hey, you're you're
a worker. You know you want to be a sergeant.
You want to run the drug unit. And that guy
ends up training the next generation of cops and not
how to not to do the job you want to solve.
You want to like be a cop and solve a
murder or solve a string of shootings. There are skill
sets utterly devoid of drug war. I mean, you need

(23:07):
to know how to work informants and not be worked
by informants. You need to know how to testify in
court without perjuring yourself. You need to know how to
write a search and seizure warrant. You need to know
how to use various forensic tools that that that don't
have any relation to the drug war. There basically skill
sets that don't have anything to do with drug prohibition,

(23:27):
and those things died. They died on the vine. When
I was covering the department in the late eighties and
through the nine you know, into the nineties, it's not
like every cop was great. You know, there were a
lot of guys who were humps, and they you know,
they couldn't make a case save their lives. But they
were usually in squads with one or two guys who
knew how to get a case through the courthouse. They
had the skill set, and so the whole squads would

(23:48):
actually be involved and maybe solving a case. So your
coronal clearance rate was sev which hey, you know that's
the national average, and maybe four out of ten of
those once you shake it out of court, maybe four
at And people who kill somebody in Baltimore go to prison.
Nowadays it's it's and one out of ten is going
to prison. No wonder we have three murders a year

(24:08):
instead of two thirty Because nobody had the drug war taught.
Everybody had to not do. Police working made for stupid
generations of cops, and then those generations, those those guys
are now the colonels and the majors. They're teaching the
lieutenants the wrong metrics, and the lieutenants are teaching the
guys on the street the wrong metrics. And the only
thing that it cost us was police work in America.

(24:31):
We'll be talking more after we hear this, adm Well, David,
So let's take into this both about Baltimore historically and

(24:52):
also contemporaneously. The drug war is raging, right. And I'm
a first year assist professor at Princeton, and I write
these articles in prominent journals, basically saying the drug war
is bust and it's prohibition is the problem, and his
drug abuse is a problem, but prohibition is a failure,
is doing more harm than good. We have to change it,

(25:13):
and it's kind of hanging out there. And a month later,
the new mayor of Baltimore, Kerchmok, who had been the
former chief prosecutor black Man, throws away his speech at
the National Conference of Mayors and gives this really remarkable
speech saying, we have to put all alternatives on the table.
The drug war is bust, right, And at that point,

(25:34):
you know, smoke and I became like a you know,
he was the Baltimore mayor. I was the Princeton academic
and we're out there, you know, debating Charlie Wrangel, the
Harlem congressman, on exactly you know. And but you know,
we're on all the TV shows, and he's on Oprah
and on and I'm on and we're on Donna Hue
and Ona Larry King and we're doing and then these
creates a task force, and I'm on part of his

(25:55):
task force, and I'm going to Baltimore and I see
him and for me, he really is one of my heroes.
You know, the fact of a young aspiring politician to
take that bowl, to stand and then not back away.
And I saw him struggling because he didn't have the
state's attorney with him, he didn't have his police chief.
He finally gets the police chief. Tom Fraser was willing

(26:16):
to go along with some of this stuff. He has
to switch health commissioners. He's struggling on this stuff to
really make it. He's wanting he wants to get needle
exchange programs going to his HIV A s and he's
being condemned by the Black church leadership in his town.
And I want to know from where you were sitting
as a reporter, I mean, how did this look to you.
I don't know if you were covering smoke at that
point or just covering on the police stuff, But what

(26:38):
did it look like from where? From where you were
saying that it was a little more complicated if you
were on the ground Baltimore. I mean, I think the
smoke administration, by the way, a prophet without honor for
saying what he did about the drug war. I never
admired a politician more um. And he did managed to
get reelected become a I think the first three term
mayor since Nancy Pelosi's father, Tom Dolllessandro. You know, Junior

(27:00):
are back in the late forties and fifties. So he
was I mean successful, but he cut off his broader
career in terms of going for He didn't make He
wasn't he wasn't considered for the Clinton cabinet. This young,
incredibly dynamic former prosecutor and big city mayor. He obviously
was a rising star in the Democratic Party, and that

(27:20):
did not materialize after he did what he did, and
he was vilified by wrangle and others, and you know,
and and tragically, so he was right, I mean, but then,
you know, I would not suggest that the Smoke administration
actually had a handle on its police department or had
any effect on the you know, I mean, I was
I'm sorry. I was a reporter on the ground. And
you know, Tom Fraser was a mess as a police

(27:44):
as a police commissioner, and the guy before him, that
the couple before him who were sort of in house,
they were not particularly uh insightful about anything at Eddie
Eddie Woods and Edward Tilment and basically the police department.
It was business as usual. Was not like Smoke had
his hand on trying to affect policy. He basically raised
the idea in theory, and so we should be talking

(28:06):
about everything. But you know, the laws stayed the same.
And you know, by the way, the Baltimore mayor does
not control the state's turn that's a state position. And
he doesn't control the laws either. I mean he could.
I mean, yeah, it's one thing to say the system.
It's one thing to say that that Smoke um. I mean,

(28:28):
he had he had the ability to you know, and
with Billinson and you know his later his later health Commission.
He had the ability to do some things on the
health side of it, but but the drug probation went
on unimpeded, and it continued to devour the police department
in the wrong ways. So I mean, I'm not I'm
not here to tell you that Kirk kerk Smoke, you know,
took a beat on the drug war in any substantive way.

(28:49):
He took a beat on it philosophically and in terms
of being an absolute truth teller. And his truth came
a lot. He came too early for anybody to um
credit it or for enough people to credit it, And
it came too early to save his political career because
he had basically spoken out against a status quo that listen,
in this country, when you say you're against drugs, or

(29:10):
you say you're hard on crime, you have a political career.
You know, when when you start talking in the amorphous
ways of rationalizing the reality of drug addiction and treating
it as a health dynamic. UM, that doesn't. That doesn't
land on voters the same way black or white. And
he had as much problem with um black community leaders

(29:31):
in Baltimore as he did with white and when he
when he started to suggesting stuff. And because the great
antagonist when once he went to Capitol Hill to argue
his point was Charlie Wrangle of all people, right, who
also chaired the Householect Committee and Narcotics and probably did
more to advance the drug war in Congress than any
Republican did back in those dates. Well, Hey, the Omnibus
crime under Clinton, it was a savage redressing of um

(29:56):
sentencing that that um, oh my god. I mean we're
still dealing with the fall from that. So in in
the new show We Own the City, the almost most
compelling and maybe central character, and this is all nonfiction,
is this sergeant I think, Wayne Jenkins, who is incredibly
sort of charismatic and corrupt. And there were there were

(30:17):
three things that struck me as I'm sort of watching
this show, David, I want to ask you about each
of these. You know, I remember when I was doing
my interviewing of d agents down in Latin America. I
remember talking, I think it was to one of the
guys who was the agent in charge in Bolivia, and
he told me about how folks in the government had
come to see him and they said, look, we want
your input. We're going to appoint a new drugs are
and we essentially have two choices here. Choice A. You

(30:41):
know what we all know is he's totally clean, but
he's totally ineffective. Choice B. He's going to be corrupt,
but you can work with him, you can make cases.
And the d A guy basically said, you know, we
opted to pick Choice be the guy we knew to
be corrupt because we knew we could still work and
make major cases with him and take out some of
the bad guys, whereas with Kay with the first option,

(31:03):
we weren't going to get anywhere. And the Wayne Jenkins character,
as portrayed in the show, and I guess in the
book as well, that you based the show on, right,
is somebody who is remarkably good. He has a nose
for cases. And some of this involved the elements of
being dirty and corrupt, but some of it is actually
doing real police work the way that you would. You know,
there's an element of and that's an amazing cop, and

(31:25):
it's amazing of him. That's an incredibly evil cop. And
I wonder what was your sense about, you know, do
these things sometimes go hand in hand. I would be
wary of saying that, uh A lot of what Wayne
was doing was um, sort of legitimate police were coming.
This is a guy who's probable cause extended down to UM,

(31:46):
guys driving in an accurate and he's carrying a book bag.
That's probable cause. So in some ways Quyne could be
right and yet wrong in sort of the ethos of
what the constitution says you're supposed to do. But beyond
that he had real street instincts. He did um, and
he was charismatic, and he was very clever about the

(32:08):
use of information and informants, and he would he would
parlay arrest into information in a way that good cops
do for the right reasons. For him, it was often
parlaying it into you know, targets that he could then rob.
Wayne was permitted to become Wayne and then to maintain
himself in the authority he had in the department because
he put dope and guns on the table and they

(32:29):
were chasing in the in the error when he was
at his height. Um, the sophistication of the police leadership
in Baltimore had at least changed from this point to
from point A to point B. Point A was put
dope on the table. They had come to realize that
putting drugs on the table meant nothing. You know, the
street value of everything is who gives a ship? You know,

(32:51):
it just doesn't matter. There's drugs everywhere, were saturated, you know,
getting a guy with a package means nothing. So to
try to reduce the violence, which was up one in Baltimore,
rather than make cases against shooters, which of course is
the hardest kind of police work, and the kind of
police worked it is really sustainable over the long term,
but requires skills, they were trying to just grab guns

(33:12):
and put guns on the table. The guns on the
table is a flawed metric. You know, it sounds better, Oh,
we got a bunch of guns. But of course it's
a gun saturated society. You know, every day they can
get a gun anywhere in Baltimore. So the idea of
just like targeting the guns. But Wayne could do that.
Wayne could put you know, a hundred forty guns in
six months, you know, on the table for the police department,

(33:32):
and he could make gun cases that might not hold
up in court, but we're nonetheless arrest stats. And so
he looked valuable and he looked incredibly valuable to police.
After Freddy Gray, which was the unattended death of a
man in the back of a police wagon in Baltimore,
which certainly was negligent um it resulted in in an
uprising or a riot, depending on your point of view.

(33:53):
And in the wake of that, the state's attorney kind
of overcharged the case, and she charged a bunch of
Fourth Amendment stuff that really he wasn't legit, but she,
you know, she rightly charged the death, but she actually
went after the officers who had made a a an
arrest that was was going to hold up in court,
and she did that for political reasons. I don't have

(34:13):
to get into it. But in the wake of that,
the police department had sort of a job slow down,
and guys were not getting out of the cars to
even clear corners anymore. Because why would I do that
when the States Attorney might indict me criminally over an
argument over the Fourth Amendment. Where I might be right,
I might still get or if if I'm wrong, you know,
even even if I mess up on the Fourth Amendment, Jesus,
the Supreme Court of the United States can't decide what

(34:35):
the Fourth Amendment means. They keep changing the rules every
every session. There's a new Fourth Amendment case, that changes
when we can make a terry stop or when I
can you know, when I can detain you, or when
I can question you. So the guys were basically saying,
why would I bother to even get out of the car,
And there's this work slow down. So here here's Wayne,
who's just you know, still out in the street, still
putting guns to the table. They needed him even more.

(34:58):
The city was a flame, nobody was doing police work.
The murderated skyrocketed, and here's Wayne and his group and
they're bringing guns in and they're bringing arrests. So he
had permission. Nobody was going to look seriously at him.
Well this this So there's two of the things that
fall from this, right. One is it made me think.
Obviously we talked about Freddy Gray and what happened in Baltimore,

(35:18):
you know, with his being killing and the and the
rioter uprising as you say, that followed that. But then
also there's significant jump in homicides in Baltimore from two
hundred four years and fifty year to over three hundred,
which is continued on for years to you know, for ever,
in the years ever since now if you look sort
of jumped forward to what happened with George Floyd. Right,

(35:39):
it almost seems like a Baltimore Freddy Gray's situation. That's
once again, you know, kind of got gotten the nationalized. Right,
So if you look just last year, right, I mean,
homicides have jumped so much in the past two years
because of the pandemic a lot of reasons. But in Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Portland, Oregon, meant, Louisville, Milwaukee,

(36:00):
Albuquerque too, sign all broke their pre existing records for
the most homicides ever. And the question rises is how
much of that is this sort of post Freddie I mean,
you make and we own the city. You point out
the kind of cops slowdown, you know all the reasons
you just described for not wanting to take any risks
on the streets. Right, do you think there essentially was
a nationalization of this phenomenon with cops basically saying fuck it, like,

(36:25):
we're not gonna take any risk, We're not going to
do what we should do because we know community is
not supporting us. But community is not supporting us, and
we're getting grief and we're the bad guys. But there's
also a little bit of if we can't do police
work the right in legal way, we're not going to
do it at all. And what I would argue is
that the drug war, over the course of generations, basically

(36:48):
eroded everything that the Fourth Amendment stands for. And so
you don't have police who understand when you can legally
do it terry stop, or what the what the probable
causes they can allow them to detain somebody, or when
you have to mirandize somebody. These things became unimportant because

(37:09):
you know, a generation ago when these cops were coming
on the force in Baltimore, and I'm always gonna speak
to Baltimore, and I mean, you can't get me to
talk about what happened in to Soon if I'm not
from Tucson. But watching what happened in Baltimore. We had
a mayor, Marty O'Malley, who wanted to be governor very badly.
In fact, he wanted to be president, and he needed
he needed a miracle in Baltimore. He needed to show

(37:31):
that he was the tough on crime. I solved the
problem of Baltimore and the and the street culture that
had been so destructive to the city, and so he
started to um arrest everybody, and by ever everybody, I
mean it was ridiculous. In a city of six hundred
thousand people, his police department a hundred thousand drug arrests
are not drug arrests, just all arrests in one year,

(37:52):
one out of every six people. By by per capita,
I mean, obviously there were people who were lasted seven, eight,
ten times. But he basically was clearing the streets on
no probable cause. There were laws on the books by
this time, you know. And and for this we can
bless our city council that may basically make most of
the inner city a quote drug free zone, meaning it
was like we've declared these ten blocks of Monument Street

(38:15):
to be a drug free zone, meaning you can't loiter
in them. That's insane that if you if you understand
the Fourth Amendment, you know, wait a second, I live
here on this block. You're saying I can't walk. You're well,
you can walk, But are you gonna stand out here
in your stoop? Yeah, I'm gonna stand. It's just it's
a nice day. I'm gonna stand out here on my steps.
You're going to jail O'Malley's theory was insane that it

(38:35):
may sound. Was if I can lock everybody up who's
standing hanging around on the street, they can't shoot each other,
and I'll get the murders down under two hundred, as
I promised. If they're in their houses, they're not gonna
shoot each other. They're gonna shoot each other on the street.
That's what the police commanders were told. So we locked
up a hundred thousand people, and the Fourth Amendment we
trained a whole generation of cops how not to basically

(38:56):
police legally. To me, it's not like I don't want
to do police work because you don't support me. It's
I don't want to do police work because I don't
know how to do police work. I no longer understand
the difference between somebody who truly is loitering and and
and who for a basic loitering statute, might you know
as fragile as loitering is as as a I mean,
there's a there's enough abuse of that statute, of course,

(39:19):
but I don't even have to think about what I'm
seeing them doing, or how long they're doing it, or
whether or not there in any way have given me
probable cause to suspect that they're trafficking in drugs on
this corner. It got to the point of you're here,
I got you in the wagon. You go And those
are the cops who um those those became a generation later,
the cops who are in the gun Traced Task Force.

(39:41):
Phil When when O'Malley is campaigning for mayor in of Baltimore,
you know a schmoke is retiring from being mayor. He's
holding up your book the corner. I know at the
same time that he's saying drug dealer that yes, I listen,
I can't. I mean O'Malley quite frankly. Then he becomes governor.

(40:03):
I gotta tell you back in two thousand and seven,
I we had my Drug Policy Alliance. We had some
lobbyists working for us in Annapolis, the state capital. There
was a very minor parole reform bill. Uh O'Malley had
told our allies he was gonna sign the thing. I
think maybe, David, you may even have submitted written testimony
in that case. You know, it looked like we were
just about there, but he surrounded himself with all all

(40:26):
the I think so with all these former prosecutors and
he vetoed the damn thing, and so I always saw
O'Malley and also his repudiation of Schmoke. Yeah, I mean
it was just about him when he ran for president.
I mean, any were any access I had to any
influential Democrats to damn him, I did because I just
think he was a hypocrite. You know, people think it's
personal and and look I had some dust ups tossed

(40:48):
ups with him over filming the wire in Baltimore that
you know, we're hilarious in their own right. But you know,
I'm a I'm a trained reporter. I don't take stuff personally.
I saw him alreaty on the train a long time
after we had our beefs, and like I bought him
a beer and we sat there and we shot the
ship and it was like, you know, it's fine. You know,
we both like Irish music. It's great, you know. But

(41:09):
the problem is is he was one of the fundamental
forces that for political gain and for a very naive
sense of how he could reduce violence. Um to credit
him at all with a decent motive. He really impaired
that police department. He taught them things and he showed
them they could do things that that they should never
have gone down that path, although although there was a

(41:30):
drop right in a homicide raider in the first few years.
And I guess he had a police commission at Norris
who was pretty good and then he got in trouble
but became one of the actors on your TV show,
I believe. So he had a brief phase he had well,
he had a uh maybe a decline in homicides, which
you know, he brought in Eddie Norris, who was had

(41:51):
been a detective sergeant work in murders. Like Eddie Norris
understood police work, probably the last police commissioner we had
who truly understood that, you know, the way you reduced
crime is by knowing who's doing the bad stuff and
you know, getting a warrant for the right guy and
kicking at his door four in the morning and arresting
him for doing what he did. That was that he
Norris's sort of d n A from from his time

(42:13):
in New York. You know, he was he was in
New York at the time that they were doing that
kind of work. And to his credit, I would say,
you know, left to his own devices, he he got
a probable meaning meaning I believe it actually happened reduction
in violence over the first couple of years of the
Omaliy administration. It wasn't enough to get down to the

(42:36):
campaign promise of less than two murders a year. I
think it got it down to from the three hundreds
to to seventy. But when the orders started coming from
city Hall to lock everybody up and mass arrest and
and do what they did in New York or you know,
do do a Giuliani and lock everybody up for you know,
spitting on the sidewalk, Norris resisted, and Norris said, that's
not it's not only not police work, it's a waste

(42:58):
of resources, and eventually had a falling out and he
left and a string of police reporters who were willing
to do that kind of Actually Kevin Clark, now Kevin
Clark was also from New York. He had a problem
with it. And Kevin Clark found out about the cooking
of the stats that happened to because here's the other
thing about them all is he had a reduction in murders,

(43:18):
but he had like a forty reduction in serious assaults
and aggravated assaults and shootings, but especially aggravated assaults. No,
you can't do that. It's statistically impossible. Either. That means
either that the people shooting guns in Baltimore are becoming
um worst shots. They're not, They're not firing as lethally

(43:39):
as they did in previous generations. They somehow you know,
you can't use their handguns anymore, or your trauma units
are now saving triple the numbers that they were saving,
you know the year prior, of course, And well he
did hilarious stuff, I mean Schmokes last year. He went
back into smokes last year of police stats and said, oh,

(44:01):
you guys miscalculated, and he basically reclassified a bunch of
common assaults under Smokes here as aggravator assaults. So that
then when his numbers came down a little bit, he
could make it look like his numbers came down a lot.
I mean, Marty was so dirty with the status. Yeah
a few as he was guy was already running for

(44:22):
mayor and he was already composing his position paper on
how he fixed Baltimore. Let me pull you, let me
put you away for this for a second. So if
you look at the drug arrest stats over the last
few years, what you see is there's still a significant
racial disproportionality, with blacks much more likely to get arrested
even for things in which whites engaged in at equal rates. Right,

(44:43):
but it's declining, and the major reason has been a
significant increase by the hundreds of thousands in the number
of people being arrested for meth amphetamy and offenses in
recent years, which is primarily white people. So the hypothetical
for you, David is could you envision doing either looking
looking retrospectively or prospectively doing a show that actually focused

(45:05):
in the way you did in the wire Are we
on this city on the white metho anthetamy drug scene?
I mean, because it also has a way of showing
how the this issue is as much about class as
it is about race. Very much. It's very much. And yeah,
I listen, you could start at any point and make
the same show. At this point, I would say that
the um the increase in targeting of a white drug

(45:28):
activity because the methode epidemic is has given a generational
bump to the drug war, is that what seemed to
be overtly racist um and and targeted towards people of color,
is now raw class control. It's now just you know,
are you poor, are you marginalized? Are you at the

(45:49):
economic fringe of society? You know, are you do you
have one hand on a drug? That is something that
has given the drug war a sufficient bump incredibility, you know,
lock up more white people and we can keep doing this. Um.
And it's the opposite of the simplicity of the drug
war is a racist enterprise looked. Drug probation was always
targeted towards feared, feared groups. I mean, you know, the

(46:12):
first I think the first drug statutes in this country
were anti yellow peril opium denis on the West coast,
you know, anti Chinese legislation, and then that goes back,
you know, into the nineteenth century. But I think beyond
that right now there's a general class war going on again,
and poor whites are happily included. Um. But having said that,

(46:36):
you know, if you got if you'd talked to me
about the Baltimore Police Department of the nine sixties or
nine fifties or nineties, um, it was ruthlessly racist and
and almost proudly so. UM. And at the moment that
it started to have to integrate, you would have thought
that that would have humanized in some basic way the

(46:57):
police response. My argument is the reason it didn't was
that there was this overlay of drug prohibition that allowed
the dehumanization to become systemic, even at the point at
which that you were reducing the racial disparity in the department.
And you know, one of the guys, one of the
saddest interviews I ever did in my life, was Bishop Robinson.

(47:17):
He rose to the rank of being the Secretary of
Public Safety for Maryland under under William Donald Shaeffer. He
came on the Baltimore Department like in nineteen fifty one
and was of course young black officer. He got involved,
He got involved with the old bn d D actually
for a while and and was doing undercovers with them.
So he was early on in the in the drug
Ian nineteen fifty one, my god, and he sort of

(47:38):
fought the drug war, and he was one of the
guys who was there. He was the first black police
commissioner in Baltimore that would have been the mid eighties,
and then became the secretary of the Secretary of Public
Safety later on. He supervised a lot of the drug
war and a lot of the building of new prisons
in Maryland when they were trying to arrest their way
out of the cocaine epidemic in the in the eighties,

(48:00):
early nineties, Speci particularly the nineties, and when he was retired,
I sat across from an Italian restaurant in Baltimore and
he looked at me and he said, the drug war
was a total mistake, the total mistake. We it led
us all, it led us wrong, the whole way. So
just a disaster. We should have never we should have
never gone there. And of course he's retired, he's speaking quietly.
Nobody ever says it when they have the job. That's

(48:22):
the hard but he but he was sincere and it
was it was a guy who had given his life
to it. You know. Let's take a break here and
go to an ad. The other interesting thing when I

(48:44):
think about The Wire are those episodes involving Hamster damn right,
the sort of where the cops say, let's hell, allow
an open air place where the junkies and the dealers
and every bills can gather and we'll get him off
the neighboring streets. And interestingly it's called Hamsterdam, although the
real model is more sort of Needle Park from Zurich,
which is where you actually had a kind of open

(49:06):
air scene like that. But I wonder how did you
come up with that idea for that? Well, look, the
addiction is not going to go away, and and you
know ed and I had seen um what the culture
of addiction had had done to that neighborhood when we
were reporting the quarters. So the idea that you can
just leave it be and not not respond to it
as a society is disastrous. But the idea that you

(49:30):
can chase it all over the world and try to
arrestorate it problem is also insane. So what might you
plausibly do if you're a city like Baltimore, And we
thought about it, we said if they could in some
way practice harm reduction geographically and basically say, look, we're
not going to mess with you if you're selling or
buying drugs in these areas because these are you know,
these are devoid of residents, devoid of you know, we

(49:53):
we have a lot of brown fields and bottom we
have a lot of excess real estate right now, it's
devoid of commercial strips or schools. You know, we're doing
less damage then fighting you where we're fighting you and
and and not achieving anything. And then maybe we start
putting social programs down there, and maybe we start doing
you know, addiction outreach, and maybe we start doing community

(50:13):
outreach and and and try to reach people and try
to pull them from addiction. But while they're in the
act of throws of addiction, they're not destroying neighborhoods. And
the drug wars not destroying neighborhoods, and so and I
came up with the idea and said, what if the
commander tried to do this on a small scale, what
would it look like? And I don't think we pulled
the punch about making it making Hamsterdam the actual area

(50:34):
that we conceived of, you know, an area of vacant
row houses and whe else, as horrific as it would be,
because I mean, you know, we and I have been
through the shooting galleries of of Franklin Square over West Bottomwore.
We've seen what addiction looked like and what sort of
masked you know, a drug market does to a neighborhood.
So we weren't trying to pull the punch or say

(50:56):
it was gonna be pretty or saying it was gonna
you know, it was gonna result, you know, sunshine and
warm feelings. But we were really interested in the notion
of what might you do if, if if if if
reducing the harm of drug addiction was your goal societally,
and the idea of you know, arresting everybody and and

(51:17):
basically um carrying on this war was not your goal.
And so that's how much were you aware of what
was going on in Europe in this regard because you know,
we think about it. Yeah, we knew about Cirk and
we knew about you know, they're obviously liberalizations in the
Netherlands had already occurred, and and and Portugal was on
the way. I mean, yeah, I mean there were other

(51:38):
people who were doing a better job of trying to rationalize.
You know, it's interesting, David, I'll tell you, in terms
of the empirical evidence we do, you typically see is
that the early phases of the decriminalized seeing like that
are almost the optimal drug policy because it doesn't bring
all the risks that come with full legalization. I mean
that if she has benefits as well, but also problems
in terms of mass marketing, But you're doing away with

(52:01):
most of the harms of prohibition. And so if you
look at what the Dutch did with the cannabis coffee shops,
if you look at what they did in the neighbor
of Christiana in Denmark where they had an opener marijuana saying,
if you look at the first year of Needle Park,
these were all highly successful. But then what happens after
a few years is that the gangsters essentially take over,
the criminal organizations take over the marijuana growing, the biker

(52:23):
gangs get involved in the production, in the production side,
you know, all this sort of stuff. But I thought
it was fascinating when when you did that, and if,
by the way, if you have a real police response
where they know how to do do casework, then you
can try to interdict that. And one of the things
that Ed Burns, my writing partner and former police detective.
One of the things that he said, which I found

(52:45):
really insightful, was if you could just put it up
to the assistant states attorneys the prosecutors that when you
grow brought in a drug arrest, they basically asked you,
why did you arrest this guy? And if your answer
was I was standing there and he was most to
the groutstay you know you stay, I saw him. Cop drugs,
and like, I'm not signing your overtime slip. Go back

(53:07):
out and get me something better. If you could do that,
you'd start to fix the police department, you know, if
you But if the guy comes in and says, this
is a guy I think, you know, I think he's
hooked up with this guy, and I think and I
think these guys shot three people in my post, and
like the guy has a reason why he targeted the
arrest and he says that, and and basically it's credible
enough and he basically makes enough of a case so

(53:27):
that you're listening to somebody's trying to do police work.
All right, all right, well let's try to make this case.
In some ways, I realized that you're you're dangerously close
to something called selective prosecution. And it's got it's out
in problems. But but basically, the idea of a stat
is a stat is what got you there? Is if
if your response to what you're talking about is to
march through the Christiana neighborhood and Copenhagen and basically say

(53:49):
I'm gonna rerest everybody, good luck that you know, that's
not gonna work. That's not gonna do anything. On the
other end, if you say, we've got a violent, a
bunch of gangsters who are now encroaching. Who are they?
How do we get them out? How do we extract them?
How do we make business for them? Problematic? Wow, that's
you know what they call that, They call that police work.

(54:10):
M So I think you and I had somewhat similar reactions,
um to the rise of the phrase defund the police.
But why don't I just you know, you say how
you perceived that phrase, both in terms of what's good
about it and what's bad about it? And there's nothing
good about it. Um, it's it's a it's a it's
a politically disastrous phrase. I understand the impulse, which is

(54:33):
these police agencies soak up resources that we could put
some of these We could put these resources back into
the communities in ways that might be meaningful. But the
way that lands on a voting popular specifically in a
time where crime rates arising, is are you out of
your mind? And by the way, I'm not talking about
like white suburbanites freaking out. I mean you go into
the inter city and talk to residents in West and

(54:55):
East Baltimore, Pimlico or Cherry hill, you know, people of color,
and they're like, I don't want the police to fund
and I want them to come when I call um.
The equivocation and defund the police is thinking that all
the police do is over police. These neighborhoods, um they
over police people of color. And that is absolutely true

(55:16):
in one sense, which is that which shouldn't matter, that
which constitutes harassment, that which constitutes racial profiling, that which
constitutes um. The police work that should not occur and
should not be rewarded in America does occur, and these
communities are brutally and uselessly over policed. Then when somebody
shoots someone, or when somebody's church is broken into her,

(55:38):
when somebody's raped or robbed, and you want the police
to come and you want them to respond, nobody shows up,
or if they do show up, they don't have the
skill set to arrest anybody. And by the way, these
neighborhoods a lot of times like they know who's doing,
like you know, they're scared of this. All the guys.
The guy stays on the corner, the police corps goes by.
He just stabbed someone yesterday, he stabbed somebody three weeks

(55:59):
earlier and you and nobody comes and gets him, nobody
takes out the trash, when when the neighborhood wants that
trash taken out, and so at that poment that neighborhood
is savagely under police. And a woman named joel Leevie
wrote a great book out of South central l A
called Ghetto Side about what happens when there is no
meaningful societal response to same murder and and when these

(56:22):
neighborhoods don't receive a police response that results in any
kind of response from the justice system. What happens is
the attributed violence shows up on the only the only
way you can handle the fact that somebody killed somebody
in your family or your friends, or it might be
gun for you, is to gun for them. Happening in
Mexico and Central American of course, and exactly right. So
so basically like defund is is, this is this notion

(56:44):
of the police can't solve anything. Well, I'm sorry, but
you know, the police in my time, caring the police forment,
they solved seven out of ten murders and by the
time it shook out of the court as four at
ten people went to jail and so you had a
murder rate of two twenty who are thirty in a
city of seven hundred thousand. Now I got a hundred
thousand people less in my city. They saw of the

(57:06):
murders and it's one of the ten probably goes to
prison on those on that casework. And the murder rate
is three fifty. And we're as violent as we've ever
been in modern history. Here's my motto, change the mission,
not defund, not abolished. I don't want you to park
the police. Tell the police you want them to do
this and not this. You don't want them to over

(57:26):
police the drug where you stop stop stupid. I mean,
I agree. I think that you know, defund the police
was one of the greatest gifts to the right wing
in America that chant is ever delivered. And the cutting
stupid drug war stuff and stupid overtime pay would be meaningful.
Tell us that. I know you said you're not an
expert other cities, but you know a few years ago
you came up to my city, New York, and you

(57:47):
got an award from the Osborne Association, which is a
great organization doing criminal justice reform work here, and you
called New York the death star of mass incarceration. Now,
you know, I look at my city, were in my
state where we went crazy on the drug war back
in the late eighties and early nineties, and then we
rolled back to drug war. My organization led the way
on reforming the Rockefeller drug laws. But I remember a

(58:10):
few years ago you had as many or more murders
or homicides in Baltimore one year as we had in
New Year. Our population has ten times the size of yours.
So what did you mean by the death star of
the I was referring to. Yeah, what I was referring
to is the export from New York of the of
the ideology of zero tolerance and of if they show

(58:32):
up to squeeze your wind showed as you come out
of the Midtown Tunnel, arrest them, the broken windows theory
of of Rudy Giuliani. And you know that's not what
you know. You want to know the things that reduced
crime greatly in New York, I know them, which is
one an incredible emphasis on actual police work, on debriefing

(58:53):
everybody you arrest for a crime, and prizing information above
all the guys who basically championed that in the eighties,
Um defined police working in the proper way. And that
happened in New York. I mean, you couldn't be it.
You couldn't get a gold shield in New York without
having I think too registered informants who were good, who

(59:14):
gave you information. The the idea that making cases actually
um led to police careers. It wasn't revolutionary, it was basic,
but it was heralded in New York. Um and that
that was one thing. And the other thing is, look,
you guys had Wall Street. You know if Wall Street
were North Avenue in Baltimore and North Avenue Wall Street,
you know my city would be doing fine too. Because

(59:36):
you have a thirty year run up on Wall Street.
The money has to come back somewhere. And they basically
rebuilt um huge tracks of Manhattan and much of the
outer bus And you know, I mean, I listen. I
I worked in New York in the late seventies, and
I remember trying to go buy weed and Thompson Square
and they sold me a bag of oregano and and

(59:57):
I was happy to have it because I wasn't dead
and be killed. And I went and smoked my cooking
product because um uh, because I celebrate the fact that
I had, you know, managed to live whereas I had
that experience David and Damn Square and Amsterdam. Well, I'm
saying the only thing that the only thing that can
mugg you in Tompkins Square after after the transformation of

(01:00:20):
New York because of money, because of capital, because they've
rebuilt the entire city on wealth that doesn't exist for
other second tier American cities. The only can mugg you
in Tompkin Square now is a three star restaurant. I mean,
you know, the physical transformation of New York has to
do with mass capital, rebuilding a city for fun and profit,

(01:00:42):
and Baltimore doesn't have that, and St. Louis and Cleveland,
we don't have those same options. You know. That's the
that's econ of reality. That coupled with the NYPD still
being in a police agency that values information and values
information over a lot of other things that police, you know,
departments have misvalued in other places. Uh, those are powerful forces.

(01:01:03):
So I'm curious. You have your local prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, right,
I mean, and you pointed out she made a mistake
on overcharging on the pretty great case, but she's been
one of the pioneering progressive prosecutors when it comes to
decriminalizing drug possession offenses and some other things. And what
do you think about those current policies she's trying to do.
And have the police been willing to go along withem

(01:01:25):
or do they have no choice because the prosecutors want
charge the crimes way up in Baltimore. But I don't
think the crime's way up for that reason. I think
the crime is way up because they can't make a case.
They can't make the case they and Mosby's office is
a shambles and and a lot of the veteran prosecutors
have walked away, and she will not bring cases into
court because a the police work is bad, but also

(01:01:48):
she's abandoned the basic mission of being a prosecutor. It's
one thing to say I'm going to be progressive and
I'm not going to I'm not gonna be dragging mass
arrest through my courthouse. That's, you know. I admire that.
On the other hand, there are places where you're using
charges as leverage to make real cases, and again a
blanket statement where you're not going to use what's on

(01:02:09):
the books so that somebody becomes a witness in a
shooting or in a rape or robbery. Um, that's problematic too,
because those things are you know, those those things are
leverage for an honest criminal investigator. That's how people talk.
People talk when they're in trouble. So there's not one
single answer. It's it's a case by case assessment of

(01:02:29):
where am I going to, where am I going to
use my my, my agency's resources for, and what am
I gonna achieve? And the fact is, well, she may,
you know, she may be heralded for being progressive in
some ways, her her office is is a goddamn mess.
They can't they can't do anything right. They're they're not
aggressive about the things they need to be aggressive about.

(01:02:49):
You know. Years ago, UM, we started to get into
see in New York City that a growing number of
juries were refusing to convict people for low level drug offenses,
and my organization got involved, even in a ballot initiative.
I think it was in one of the dakotas that
would require judges to inform jurors of their right of
during nullification. It did not succeed, but I think this

(01:03:11):
became an issue that you jumped on for a while.
The Wires main policy argument was in the drug war.
The drug wars destructive and it's not doing what you
think it's doing. It's destroying police work as well as
communities and families and human beings. And so we had
in Time Magazine, the writers of the of the show, UM,
as we finished, as we were wrapping up the run

(01:03:33):
of the show, we all committed to um the fact
that if we were chosen for a jury and we
were presented with a drug case possession or the distribution
that had no attendant violence that was charged as a
result of the case, we would vote to equit. We
would vote to nullify that jury. We all said it
aloud and we wrote it into Time Magazine. Yeah, David,

(01:03:54):
the problem is once you say it out loud, you
can no longer do it. Well, I know, but you know,
we were basically five guys and what we're hoping is
like we can we convinced ten more to do it.
So we wrote it out, We said it out loud,
and I've held to it. UM. I believe in that. UM.
I believe that basically what is teaching the system to
respect good police work and too and to disregard that

(01:04:15):
which is you know, over policing of human beings and
of communities is important. And to be honest with you,
I was on a jury for a drug trial in Baltimore.
I was picked. I was in the box. I was
one of one of I guess one of fourteen. They
had alternates, and the prosecutor had missed me. He for

(01:04:38):
whatever reason, he didn't know who I was. He didn't
asked me a question. I guess he figured like he's
Baltmore city. I got a white guy, got a white male.
That's good for my jury. So the prosecutor missed me.
I think the defense journey who knew I was, and
he wasn't gonna say anything. And so I sat there
until the judge and his jury instructions, in beginning to
instruct the jury, said is there anyone here who has
any objection to the nation's drug law? And I had

(01:05:01):
to raise my hand. I'm not going to perjure myself.
It's not, you know, not a perjurer. I had to
stand up and they basically said, is there no way
you can and and and so I was dismissed. So
I got I got it, at least I got in
the box. Yeah, yeah, I know, I remember being on
a grand jury. And after two days I basically called
the side of the proceduor of the room, and I said,
I can't be here. You know, It's like, you know why,

(01:05:21):
because part of my job is to get your boss fired.
I think the whole system is bullshit, you know. And
actually I managed to get off a grand jury in
New York, which is not an easy thing to do.
I wanted to be on the jury. I actually I
wanted the case to go ahead. You know, in watching
or a lot of your stuff, I mean a lot
of it. You know it's about Baltimore. But you did
New Orleans, you know about music, You did New York
City Times Square with the Deuce, about the porn industry.

(01:05:44):
You did Yonkers in the fight over housing disagregation with
fascinating to me because I grew up in Yonkers a
decade before that time that you didn't. But recently, just
a few days ago, I just binge watched the sixth
episode um Plot against America, Philip Ross novel that you
turned into this wonderful mini series. And I'll tell you something,
you know, just a few days ago, I was just

(01:06:04):
at some New York marijuana march and I'm supposed to
be a little speech, and I said, I don't want
to talk to you about this, because I said, the
reason that I got involved in trying to end the
drug war thirty forty years ago was because I saw
it as perhaps the most fundamental threat to freedom in America,
my core values. But now I look around the world
and I look at the rise of a totalitarian you know, China,

(01:06:26):
the emergence of of Putin as it kind of wants
to be a global want to be fascist, white nationalist leader,
and then of course in my own country at the
Republican Party becoming. I never would use the word fascist
loosely as a former pol. But no, I'm not going
to use it loosely. I'm saying it's specifically now applies
to the direction. And I know. And so the question

(01:06:46):
is I admired your doing that. I admired what you
did it, But do you find that this much greater,
more existential threat to our values that go way beyond
the drug war? You know, in the way the drug
wars stood out as a kind of shiny exam up
all of posing the values we stand for as Americans,
now it seems so much broader and so that goes

(01:07:06):
to you personally, David, in terms of your thinking, your mind,
and given you know the high likelihood that three years
from now we'll have a Neil fascist Republican party controlling
the White House, both Houses of Congress, and Supreme Court,
and the majority state governments, how is this going to
shape your work or is it not. I'm gonna keep
making the stories that matter to me politically. I'm a
home political writer. You know, I'm a dramatist, but I'm

(01:07:28):
also I'm writing about what interests me politically, and my
stance is not going to change. Um. I'm certainly being
given more material every moment, But how's it gonna change?
I'm not sure it's gonna it's I don't think it's transformational.
I think in some respects, you're asking me what happens
when we lose? You know, what happens when we turn

(01:07:50):
in the direction that is um anti human and anti democratic?
And the answer is, I mean, at some point, if
the money or the laws impair even narrative, if if
if open speech becomes vulnerable, then somebody will say you've
got to stop making these shows in the same way
that they're already trying to ban books, and you know
the the insanity of that, and you know, um, the

(01:08:13):
idea that somebody's political theory can be ameliorated by a
law against it is just a level of um dystopian
authoritarianism that you didn't think you were going to see
in modern America ever again, and yet here we are.
So I don't know how it's gonna affect it. I
just I know that it's never bothered me enough to
to stop doing what I'm doing. That I keep making

(01:08:35):
an argument about stuff and and nobody takes the argument,
or nobody passes a better law and fixes anything, you know.
I mean, plot against America was about Trump. It was
about a white populist um who says all the things
that voters think they want to hear and meanwhile is
eroding the very fundamentals of what the American Republican the
American experiment are about. And we made it in the

(01:08:57):
election year and when we were, um, you know, very
conscious of of the stakes. And you know, I don't
know whether anybody watched her, if it affected anyone's vote,
but we wouldn't say it any different if if we
knew Trump was about to be elected. You know what
I mean. If he had won, we would have still
made the same mini series. One of the guys who

(01:09:17):
I really loved when I was a newspaper reporter was
I have Stone. Is he Stone? Great independent voice in
journalism for many many decades? Uh And in a good
lefty at heart and um, Stone said something that I
thought was very apt. He said, Um, sometimes the fights
that you have that are where you know you can't
win and you don't win, are the ones worth having.

(01:09:40):
First of all, you know right is right, and don't
say the wrong thing because you get to win. But
second of all, maybe by you saying it and losing
somewhere down the road, um, but you've created enough gravitas
or enough momentum that somebody will take it to the
next step and then eventually maybe somebody gets to win
with it. And that's sort of That was a very
prac cool distillation of something I read years ago from

(01:10:04):
from Camu, I think in the Mythosisiphus, which was he said,
you know, to have a to have a take on something,
um or to fight for something. I'm trying. I'm really
screwing up Camu here, but but I know exactly what
the paragraph is basically said. You know, to commit to
a just cause with the certainty of defeat is absurd,

(01:10:25):
but to not commit to adjust cause because of the
certainty of defeat is equally absurd. And only one of
those choices um affords you the chance of human dignity.
That's it, man, It's like you know, just because nobody
listens to you doesn't mean the story changes. So you know,
that's that's the way you gotta be if you're dealing

(01:10:45):
with story time. Well, damn it, I don't know if
that's an uplifting note on which to end or not
to listen. Thank you ever so much for well, I'll
tell you this. It's a note that it's a it's
a note that I couldn't get out because my brains
fried after talking for an hour after. We're gonna have
to add Okay, listen, Thanks, thanks ever so much for
joining man psychoactive, and I you know, more power to you,
and I look forward to your next creations. Okay, take care.

(01:11:09):
Thank you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends
about it, or you can write us a review at
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love
to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share
your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a
message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty

(01:11:33):
that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email
us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me
on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find contact
information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of
I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me
Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by noah'm osband and Josh Stain.

(01:11:56):
The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus
and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt
Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our
music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to
a Brio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb. Next

(01:12:26):
week I'll be talking with Lady Amanda Fielding. She's the
founder and head of the Beckley Foundation, which is the
outstanding psychelic research institute in the United Kingdom. She's been
described as the Queen of Consciousness. I actually have a
particular love of L s D because of its purity.

(01:12:48):
I think in a way, it's the most cognitively stimulating
and it's the least toxic. So even when you take
it reg lee for a while, when you come off it,
you don't have a hangover, you don't have any craving.
There's no aspect of addiction about it. And actually one

(01:13:12):
needs more discipline to take it than not to take it.
In a funny sort of way, it needs discipline to
take it and work with it. Subscribe to Cycleactive now
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