Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon

While I had only watched a few episodes each of Homicide and The Wire, I did find myself watching Treme on a weekly basis. Because of this I decided to go back to where David Simon's TV career all started, namely his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets which caught the attention of the right people in the entertainment industry to be adapted into its namesake show.

Simon was a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun when he got the idea to take some time off from his beat and shadow homicide detectives. Fate was on his side as permission was given and in January 1988 he began a year of serving as a "police intern" following around the detectives of Lieutenant Gary D'Addario's squads. The book is a portrait of the men who investigated the city's murders along with the police department and, arguably, Baltimore itself. The 1980s were not a good time for American cities, Baltimore included. Poverty, drugs, white flight, manufacturing moving elsewhere – American cities struggled – and Simon chronicles the work of the people who, in a sense, are cleaning up things at the bottom of it all.

The book moves forward chronologically through the year beginning with Dets. Jay Landsman and Tom Pellegrini at the scene of a murder joking that the victim, who has a wound oozing blood, has a slow leak which can be fixed with a tire patch kit. Unsurprisingly, the detectives are masters of gallows humor and it pervades the story. There were 234 murders in Baltimore that year. Victims come and go here but a handful form the backbone of the book because the investigations continue for a long time or there was something special about the victim.

Latonya Kim Wallace was 11 years old when she was killed after being raped and the hunt for her killer plagues Det. Pellegrini throughout. It's one thing for the men when an adult finds a premature end to life but it's a whole other situation when the victim is a child and a child who was raped to boot. The shooting of a police officer is taken especially poorly by fellow officers and when officer Gene Cassidy is shot in the head, the hunt for the shooter takes on a personal note. The same goes for the slaying of a car thief who was shot by an officer. It was a potential homicide so Det. Donald Worden had to investigate. However he was investigating the potential misconduct of one of their own.

Simon portrays D'Addario's men as having something of a thankless job but a job in which they take pride nonetheless. Race enters into the equation, e.g. – having a black detective present when dealing with black witnesses. And politics is always looming in the background but sometimes comes to fore. The Latonya Wallace case brought it together with race. Not wanting the image of the police to be one that neglects the black community, extraordinary efforts were made to find the killer such as bringing in a busload of new recruits to scour the area where the girl's body was found for evidence.

While such unusual cases may provide a foundation for the narrative, it is the quotidian slayings that make up the bulk of the book. The detectives not only have to deal with gruesome crime scenes but they also make regular treks to the coroner's office to learn what the medical examiner has discovered from autopsies. Then there are attempts to find witnesses with the default scenario being that no one saw or heard anything. It's bad enough that someone was killed but the members of the community are often unhelpful. The detectives work in Baltimore's Western District which is a mostly black area and there is a deeply-rooted distrust of the police.

Simon keeps his focus narrow. We rarely witness the detectives off-duty and then it is only at a local watering hole or a vacant lot with six-packs at the ready. There are no scenes of the guys at home dealing with family life. Homicide gives us a portrait of men at work. They deal with corpses on a daily basis as well as intra-departmental politics and the never-ending pursuit of making the higher ups in city government happy with the requisite number of closed cases. To do their jobs requires not only a taste for beer but also the creation of mechanisms to cope with bodies and murderers. The men treat their circumstances with a mixture of humor and indifference.

For his part Simon writes a gritty account of his year spent with the detectives. He doesn't pull any punches and he basically portrays his subjects as guys just doing their job. They have all the same issues with their line of work that people who don't deal with murders for a living do. There is camaraderie and conflict; there are bosses to please and upset "customers". His writing style is easy going and he keeps the story moving along well with the cases mentioned above the provide a narrative thread that runs throughout as well the slow revealing of the 10 rules of the homicide squad.

Sometimes the book goes a bit too far in romanticizing the detectives as these underdogs for whom we should be rooting. It's not they aren't underdogs in a certain way but there were times when the detectives were essentially portrayed as being able to do no wrong. "Miranda rights? Fuck that! These guys have some bad guys to catch." Perhaps Simon got too close to his subjects because there were times when it felt like he really went overboard in portraying the men as Robin Hoods who felt beleaguered and were fed up with a corrupt system so they took the bull by the horns and are now these heroic crime fighters who skirt the law when necessary to bring justice.

Homicide is a great book despite this. It alternately made me laugh and feel sad. The guys in the squad are really likeable and funny. On the other hand reading about some of the stuff that people do to one another or the stupid shit people pull to avoid trouble is just sad. Madison is a small, white city and so stories of causalities from inner city drug wars just don't resonate very loudly here. Those tend to be thought of as problems belonging to someone else somewhere else. (That sentiment was heard loudly and clearly last year when news reports of intercity rail service coming to Madison were greeted by some commenters as opening the doors to [insert euphemism for poor blacks]from Milwaukee and Chicago.) But even if Madison doesn't have ghettos like Baltimore or other big American cities, Homicide does give some good food for thought. We as a country need to have a serious conversation about ending the Drug War. John McWhorter has begun making this argument at various outlets as of late. I don't know that it would be quite the magical cure that he makes it out to be but it hardly seems like things can get worse.

I don't know David Simon's stance on the Drug War but he is one of the best chroniclers of its failures we have.