Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

Years before becoming the producer of The Wire,David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter who took a year's leave of absence to cover the homicide detectives of the Baltimore City Police. He covered the unit, focusing on one shift, for the calender year 1988. The big case of the year, never solved, was the murder and probable rape of Latonya Wallace, a young (11 or 12) African-American girl. There were roughly 250 murders in Baltimore in 1988. Charges were filed against defendants in about 70% of

Years before becoming the producer of The Wire,David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter who took a year's leave of absence to cover the homicide detectives of the Baltimore City Police. He covered the unit, focusing on one shift, for the calender year 1988. The big case of the year, never solved, was the murder and probable rape of Latonya Wallace, a young (11 or 12) African-American girl. There were roughly 250 murders in Baltimore in 1988. Charges were filed against defendants in about 70% of these cases.

Murders can be usefully divided into those where the perpetrator is immediately obvious and those that are difficult to solve. Domestic disputes ending in murder tend to fall into the former category, as they often take place indoors (which often means more physical evidence and its better presevation) and in front of multiple witnesses. Drug disputes, a very common cause of murder, are often hard to solve, as they take place outside (which often means physical evidence is not preserved), the killers rarely made the mistake of leaving the murder weapon around, and people who might have seen something are going to say they don't know nothing.

Racial tension was inherent in the detective's jobs. Most of the detectives were white; most of the victims and perpetrators were African-American. Up through the early 1970s the Baltimore police department was definitely prejudicial in its treatment of African-Americans.

One point that struck me was the dependence of the police on a confession or eye-witnesses to charge a defendant. Physical evidence was primarily useful for encouraging someone to talk or as a check on the veracity of statement. Bullets retrieved from bodies had often bounced off so many of the victims bones that they were not useable to make comparisons against; and in any case you can only make comparisons if the killer was careless enough to leave the gun around, or if there were other bullets fired that you could retrieve. Useable fingerprints are found only about 10% of the time. Trace evidence (such as hair) is hardly ever useful. DNA evidence, just makings its appearance in 1988, was very useful when available but usually was not. Given the dependence of the police on confessions, the detectives the tricky job of making the suspects aware of their Miranda rights during interrogations while discouraging them from making use of these rights.

Summertime and the li

Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil's sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no pina coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by God-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical mass.