David Simon, the creator of the classic HBO drama “The Wire,” defended the show Tuesday, calling it “the best piece of conservative art ever.”
Simon, reacting in a lengthy Twitter thread lasting 30 posts, feels that the show may represent the police in a positive light in the same vein as it deals with the fight against violent crime and murder, while they doomed. Also highlight resources. Comprehensive “War on Drugs.”
Simon wrote, “When-as-bird engages an opponent’s language in his rhetoric, you can be assured of one thing.” “He’s filling a strawman weak enough to wrestle with it. Two things can be true at once and that’s the case.”
Simon was reacting to a Twitter comment from user @RowanKaiser, whose post was in turn a response to another earlier Simon thread discussing mass incarceration and the policing of violent crime and murder.
“The Wire remains the best conservative art ever made,” the tweet read. “David Simon has no idea it’s true.”
Simon then placed his treatise on a numbered list (thought he eventually gave up counting them in the interest of efficiency).
“Mass incarceration and the drug war have filled many American prisons and so have systemic racism and class warfare,” Simon wrote. “It has to stop and I’ve been debating and writing about it for 25 years.”
Simon has proven to be a prolific creative for HBO over those 25 years, producing three full series and five miniseries for the network, many of which feature similar dramatic themes involving the police and urban decay. These include his latest effort, 2022’s “We Own This City”, a six-episode limited series, and “The Deuce”, which spanned three seasons from 2017–19.
“In Baltimore and other cities, arrest rates for the most violent categories of crime have fallen over the past two decades,” Simon wrote. “The drug war of years has taught the last two generations of cops the skills to sweep corners, make car stops and pocket their stats, pay their OTs and courts, and get promoted. The skill of retrospectively investigating a murder or rape or robbery and arresting the right person has been dramatically devalued. Even the patrol function in the urban department has been changed from crime prevention to street level victim and drug data collection. And so, now in my city, the murder rate is higher than ever in history and few are prosecuted. The cost, again, is brutally racial. ,
“The Wire” is often in conversation as one of the best TV dramas of all time. Running five seasons and 60 episodes from 2002–08, it exposed the plight of the urban drug trade, using Baltimore’s inner streets as a canvas and using the city’s police and newspaper staff as supporting stars.
“If you talk to people who live in my town, or do wages or try to raise families, if you listen, you learn that no, they don’t want to be harassed and abused and cruel. Some army of the occupation fighting an endless siege in the name of substance prohibition has eroded not only civil liberties but the quality of law enforcement,” Simon wrote. “But they very much want the police not to disappear, but to come to the corner and stop the accomplice who shot people. They want that man to leave.”
Read Simon’s full thread below.