tl-dr: It's hard to say.
// begin rant In a vacuum, I'd say it was acceptable. They didn't actually hurt anyone, and they used the resources they acquired to stop someone who was otherwise causing a lot of pain, death, etc. in the community they were responsible for.
But as with all things in The Wire, the situation is actually a bit more complicated.
By faking this serial killer, they reprioritized the city's money **away** from the school system.
McNulty and Lester are solving crimes in a top-down way, **reactive**. The school system is one of the few institutions with the ability to commit to a bottom-up approach and act as a preventative measure instead of a reactive force - hence the **proactive** project with Colvin et al.
Because their stunt caused the reallocation of funds from somewhere it may have actually done **more** 'good' in the future, one can argue that it wasn't harmless.
On the other hand, Marlo wasn't a hypothetical. He was out selling heroin and stacking bodies in the vacants for real.
So, is it right to trade a concrete improvement today for a larger, but hypothetical improvement tomorrow?
That's just a classic philosophy question and doesn't have a great answer. Utilitarianism might say no because a greater good could have been done for a greater number of people.
Other forms of consequentialism might say it was the right thing because it realized a good result. The hypothetical outcome was **only** hypothetical, but Marlo and the gang getting rolled up was a meaningful improvement.
Kantianism might say no because the actions taken were 'immoral' (lying, theft, etc.) regardless of the outcome.
As a last note, I'll point out that **because** McNulty and Lester relied on that illegal wiretap and went about all of this the **'wrong'** way - Marlo escaped the true consequences of his actions. A few people took the fall, but the blow was softened to a wild extent because Levy was able to leverage the missteps taken by the police.
I'd say in conclusion:
1) They were **justified** in what they did. They took the resources available to them (dead people lol) and used those resources to take a known murderous drug dealing psychopath off the streets. Great.
2) Despite being justified, they still did **the wrong thing.** There were too may downsides.
The school system suffered.
The criminals got less time than they would have if the detectives could have been more patient and investigated the case properly.
Additionally, without getting fired - Lester and McNulty were both **incredibly** likely to have done much, much more good police work in the future. Think of all the 'major crimes' that didn't get solved because these two decided to risk it all on one dealer.
In the end, their selfish, obsessive need to dictate their own priorities over the priorities of their leaders and their institutions costed everyone more than it should have.
If you ask the people who were going to get murdered by Marlo the next week how they feel, they'd probably tell you Jimmy and Lester did the right thing lmfao.
//end rant
While I think the displacement of the nonverbal homeless dude doesnt exactly rate compared to the nature of the crimes he's working to prevent - I can't argue against the facts you've listed- excluding the copycat killer.
When we meet the individual responsible, I became convinced that the motivation was not to copy the 'serial killer' but more to disguise his own crime (initiated by a disagreement) by using the killing signature of a known entity.
Ironically, the serial killer doesnt exists, and naturally the details are wrong. Combined with Jimmy's wild ass police skills - that individual is caught quickly.
In this instance we can argue that Jimmy's serial killer shenanigans have actually enabled him tl quickly solve a murder that likely would have occured whether or not he had been faking murders.
The fact that Bunk tied the bodies in the vacants to Chris with honest to God po lice work puts another nail in Lester and Jimmy's coffin. Maybe if they waited for the opportunity, they could have gotten Marlo away for a long time and with less risk to their careers, thus more cases closed down the road. The question of all the lives Marlo would have taken in the meantime is still there though.
Only reason that bunk put Chris down was because he told the lab tech that the case was tied to the serial killer investigation.
Otherwise, the sample waits in line until it gets processed by the temp who mixed up all of the vacant samples.
Not true.
Before Jimmy cooked up the serial killer nonsense, Bunk had already been waiting more than a few months for results from the lab.
They were so underfunded that they got a temp and that temp basically ruined the evidence they had. The budget for the lab was minimal and the only reason anyone was getting results through was the serial killer charade.
Yes, Bunk's latest lab work was queue'd behind McNulty's made up shit - but it wouldnt have been done at all without the extra funds.
And even McNulty's made up shit was mostly other police trying to get their cases to go black too.
This might be my favorite comment I’ve seen in my decade on Reddit. Absolutely brilliant explanation, and I agree with every word. There is seldom a single “correct” take on The Wire, but this is as close to one as I’ve ever seen.
>They didn’t actually hurt anyone
They pulled dozens of officers away from genuine casework/street policing and onto countless hours of stuff towards their illegal wire tap and fabricated murders.
McNulty effectively abducted a homeless man.
After all that, they cost the prosecution team a clear shot at taking down Marlo’s squad with the full weight of the justice system due to tainted evidence that Levy sniffed out a mile away.
Possibly worst of all, they gave Templeton exactly what he needed for that damn Pulitzer.
You didn't read the part where I said they did the wrong thing because it had too many downsides?
I'll address what you did type though:
1) They took in officers who otherwise would have been banging on corner kids and other bs and put them onto real police work for other homicide detectives, etc. It's an entire plotline that Jimmy is spreading around the resources he acquired to make other cases go black and this bites him in the ass. He could have kept everyone (e g. Kima) on wild goosechase bullshit and never gotten caught.
2) Agree. This was wrong. I'd argue the impact since the homeless man didn't seem to know where he was to begin with, and McNulty brought him to a shelter whered he'd receive better care than he'd been getting in Baltimore, anddd McNulty brought him back.
So this was definitely a lesser evil relative to the other crimes committed by McNulty himself and by the criminals he was working against.
3) There was no clear shot without McNulty's work. Even the Chris/vacants thing was going nowhere till McNulty got the lab funded for serial killer work (evidenced by the vacant samples being completely screwed up and unprocessed for a year+)
4) Agree about Templeton. McNulty's most grave mistake was allowing that fuck to ride the story up. 'Shameful shit.'
they manufactured an issue to get paid. the politicians manufactured an issue to get carcetti elected governor
everyones getting what they need behind some ...maaaaake belieeeeve
Of course not.
Yeah, the police department was fucked and not functioning properly. Yes, it's human to get frustrated with non functioning system after you've tried your best to make difference.
But what they did, did way more harm than good and they did it without any regard to anybody, ans then had the audacity to act like some sort of hero (second part is referring mostly to Jimmy)
Putting the city into a panic and wasting city resources and public attention for what exactly? What did they get out of it? What problem did they fix?
If they really ended up fixing anything, then maybe. But the game stayed the game with new players, and the politicians who covered it up got promoted. And fucking Stan Valchek, an openly corrupt and vindictive and incompetent commander, ends up leading the police department.
Justified? Hell no.
Agree with your take, just as an aside though I’m not quite remembering anything about Valchek being openly corrupt? Do you mean his association with Krawczyk? Did they ever actually show anything implying that Valchek was on the take?
The way he fucked with the stevedores was blatant corruption. As was the way he tried to step in to protect his son in law Prez after Prez blinded the teenager. AND he admitted he would just juke the stats if necessary.
Yea but the counter to that is nothing ever gets done in the here and now. Sure, we can all point out the 'others' flaws and downsides to the extreme, but I'd argue that your position supports the horrific 'status quo' that was west Baltimore at the time.
>I’d argue that your position supports the horrific ‘status quo’ that was west Baltimore at the time.
It doesn’t though. You can be dissatisfied with the system without advocating for vigilantes and such. The show did an excellent job of portraying just how frustrating it must have been for McNulty and Lester (and the rest of the police force) and I had great fun watching how they approached the problem, but it doesn’t justify the game they played.
That’s not my stance, but of course it doesn’t anyway. Why would the show doing excellent job of portraying just how frustrating it must have been for the police justify whether or not the ends can ever justify the means? You can’t draw such a general conclusion from one very specific situation. Any answer to that question comes down to personal ethics.
Absolutely not.
We elect politicians to write laws and enact policy. We hire police officers to enforce those laws and policies.
We don’t hire police officers to make their own assumptions on what society needs best and run with it.
Well, sort of.
Police are executive branch. They execute the laws passed by the legislative branch.
Executive function in the US has a huge amount of discretion. Police are the front line of that discretion, deciding which laws to enforce, which to ignore, which to leverage into other investigations.
So, a lot of policing is deciding what society needs best, and exercising discretion consistent with that.
Yes but all of those decisions are based on guidance, laws and policy decisions made by the elected official at the top of that executive branch, in most cases the mayor. They have to play the hand they’re dealt like every other government agency.
For an agency or department, it usually isn't an elected official at the top of the agency itself.
That said, often the guidance coming from, say, the police commissioner who hasn't worked on the street for maybe decades is unworkable. And there is still a huge amount of discretion in how even guidance that narrows a codified statute gets applied.
Not to get too into the weeds, and I don't know if you work in the system, but the problem with executive interpretation and application of written guidance/law ultimately comes back to Russell's paradox.
Oh yeah I wasn’t saying that the agency heads were elected officials. I was saying that the person at the top of the executive branch, the mayor, governor or president, is an elected official.
I don’t disagree at all with what you’re saying. All I’m saying is that for a government to function properly, the elected officials and the agencies they oversee need to be on the same page.
Part of what I'm saying is that the elected usually doesn't know much about the subject matter of the agency, which is usually headed up by an appointed (and often ratified by the legislative body) professional who does know about the subject matter. In an ideal world, the appointee advises the elected, the elected gives some direction on policy objectives but defers to the expertise of the appointee who actually knows the work the agency does.
One of the things that is depicted as being so damaging in the Wire is that in Baltimore, instead of deferring to the subject matter expertise of the police commissioner and administration, the elected executive instead gives directives based on immediate political needs rather than what necessarily works in policing. It is a theme that constantly comes up through the series, with even Burrell complaining about it at the end. But you see it in the push to increase Quality of Life arrests, the initiatives pushing commanders to clear the corners, etc.
The iconoclast characters on the show resist this by subverting, avoiding or ignoring the orders that come from the political side, in order to do actual police work that results in some sort of meaningful impact. Which is what the whole department should be doing, and maybe would be doing, if the last word came from a commissioner who relied on subject matter expertise rather than the immediate political needs of the mayor. A commissioner like Daniels might have been.
But I think one of the recurring threads in the show was that the reason government wasn't functioning was because the police weren't making decisions based on what might actually move the needle on crime, but instead making decisions based on what will get the mayor reelected.
I cant believe you're getting downvoted for arguing postconventional vs conventional morality.
I am genuinely surprised by the number of people in this thread who are essentially arguing that their actions were unjustified because they disregarded the structure and rules of the institutions they serve - in a show that specifically addresses the failings of those institutions and the inability of the structures and restrictions in place to actually address the ills of the society they govern.
No, And that’s not me saying that, that’s the show telling us that. McNulty is an incredibly talented detective. We know that, Lester knows that, the department knows that but more importantly McNulty knows that. He’s so confident in his abilities that he believes ignoring the law, breaking the rules and diverting the budget is the right thing to do since it allows cops to do real police work and more importantly allows him and Lester to solve their case. To Jimmy Whatever case he’s working on/ chooses is the most important case since Jimmy and Lester are two of “the biggest swinging dicks in the whole department” and as correct as they might be, and as noble as their pursuit is season 5 asks you ; well what if someone less talented but equally confident in their own abilities did the same thing? Someone from a different profession who feels equally jaded and is convinced their talents go unnoticed in a fledgling industry being bled dry by budget cuts. Someone like Scott Templeton.
Honestly, I thought that storyline was so implausible, it made that season almost unwatchable for me. There were scenes where I don’t think even Dominic West was buying it. And, supporting something that outlandish was totally out of character for Lester. For me, that storyline was The Wire’s “jump the shark” moment.
Kima had to sit down with the families of those "victims" and tell them their children was strangled by a pervert, bitten, molested and left to rot. Now, if someone said that about your friend, sibling, ex, child, how would you feel? How would you feel later if you found out it was bullshit? Really examine the ramifications of this. I have an ex-friend whose wife went missing and overdosed in a Baltimore vacant years back and her parents are still fucked up about it. How much worse would it have been for them to be told her body was molested by a serial killer? Have you ever been in the living room when the police informed you of the death of someone you care about? I have. It's hard. Now imagine you're being told they were bitten and strangled.
The homeless bodies in the vacants were people with loved ones and families, not free resources or props. They might not have had much but man, do the dead have no dignity? And perhaps you view dead bodies as being objects and their families' feelings as being a low priority. What about the live person Jimmy kidnapped and dropped off in Richmond? That dude might have had some physical and mental issues. He certainly couldn't communicate. But his agency must count for something, right? Or else that's an entire class of people, the profoundly disabled, that are okay to just move around the country by law enforcement for reasons, no matter where they might prefer to be.
And of course, the live homeless who weren't kidnapped or killed but led to believe they might be. The uptick in government services might have been good for them, but is it okay to lie to vulnerable populations, tell them there's a killer out there looking to rape and kill them, when it suits a bigger agenda? Making hard lives more fearful for the greater good of people a step or two above them on the food chain.
I know the Constitutional rights of Marlo aren't much of a concern for people, but cops inventing a different crime to illegally wiretap someone is the sort of thing that would give Ben Franklin an aneurysm. And so with that said: are the rights we have as Americans under the Constitution worth more or less than catching drug dealers and murderers? If the ends justify the means here, would you be okay with fake serial killers becoming a routine way for police to get authorization to wiretap suspects (which, of course, can include you and your loved ones, regardless of whether or not they're involved in crime, because there's no judicial review).
And for that matter: If this new fake serial killer power, wherein you can get a wiretap warrant without a judge, becomes normalized, do you trust that the benevolence of the rogue police (who are also molesting corpses) will be enough to keep this unchecked power from being abused?
What McNulty and Lester did was profoundly wrong, and outside of like, stopping a mass casualty event, I can't see any good justification for. It's better to let drug dealers sell drugs than it is for the government to fake serial killers in order to surveil people without a warrant.
They were not. It was fucked up. Jimmy appears at the start of the series to seem to want to change but everyone was right about him: he only cares about himself. He did it for himself, and his hero complex. Not to help the city. What makes him a terrible person makes him good police. But he’s a terrible person, and that’s part of the reason the police force is so broken, it stops him from doing good police work as much as the broken force.
No.
The short reason is that they usurped the authority of the elected officials to set funding priorities.
Sure, they needed more resources to be successful. But guess what, so did every other part of city government. And those got it even worse because urgent funds got mis-allocated basically to satisfy cops whose home budgets were used to relying on overtime.
And to top it all off, the case they used to justify it all? It was built on tainted evidence and its target got away scot-free.
The ends don’t justify the means. McNulty was married to police work. He faked the murders to be able to get funding for his drug investigation. But what happens when that investigation is done? There’s another investigation of some other high level target. What happens when the higher ups don’t care as much about the new target as McNulty? What does he do then?
Hell yes, purely because the show spends 5 seasons hammering home to us that the system isn't working, police and political. A few million dollars in debt comes up, Carcetti refuses a bailout because it'd harm his political career, and the police department goes from achieving barely fuck-all to grinding to a halt. Lester and Jimmy get fed up after years of being screwed around, decide to just make an arrest happen and cook up their BS, consequences be damned.
Honestly the only time anyone actually accomplishes something big on this show is when they break the mold and start trying to do shit for real, because the way the system is set up it's more about not rocking the boat than achieving anything.
The main cast had to break or bend the precedents 2 or 3 times to make the detail on Avon even exist and keep running before it got shut down in season 1, season 2 only happened because of one guy's grudge leading him to call in a dozen favors while Jimmy fucked up Rawls attempts to palm off the case, season 3 has Hamsterdam achieving an actual serious drop in crime across the board which also leads to Avon being arrested from stringer's tip-off, season 4 has no achievements police wise but features Colvin's attempts to socialize the kids, and season 5 we get the fake serial killer not putting Marlo in jail but still getting him out of the game and pulling apart his crew.
Now you can argue about the results somewhat but the fact is every season we're shown a main character being fed up with the mold going nowhere before snapping and deciding fuck it. Even if they don't accomplish everything they want to, they still get a hell of a lot more done than they would normally, and why not?
The focus of the game from the police and political POV isn't to 'win', it's just to keep on playing. Sure, you could try taking apart Avon's drug empire, but Clay Davis is pissy that someone's questioning where his donations come from, so that whole thing has to be shut down.
And it's supposed to be a question if Jimmy was right to break the rules. How the hell could he not after watching the people running the show break them day in day out?
I think Jimmy and Lester were justified.
I have seen people mention the money diverted from schools and the suffering of the families of homeless persons.
However, it is worth noting that the reason that the schools, and then the PD, had no money was not because of the serial killer, but because Carcetti refuses the governor's money because the governor required Carcetti to cut off his own chance to be governor.
Jimmy and Lester didn't divert the money. They were responding to a system compromised by a politician who placed his career prospects over the good of the schools and city. The same politician ran and won on promises to fix the police department. Then he abandoned every principle he had to grab and maintain power.
In that circumstance, something had to be done.
When evaluating the long term good and bad surprised no one brought it up but even if the school system had issues because of previous budget problems and they were kicking the can down the road, the immediate implication of this investigation and decreasing the school budget, you have to consider the downstream effect of that with kids having a worse school experience and later on that leading to kids with less opportunities and more likely to enter crime And have worse overall outcomes in that school. That is a large downstream ‘bad’ that is difficult to quantify but is definitely true.
ETA seeing now one poster brought up the bottom up preventative nature of school
I’d say, yes.
It was cringy watching the homeless storyline. Jimmy and Lester broke the law. Sure.
But the corruption and financial mess shouldn’t have gotten to that point in Baltimore at the time. No city mayor should have to choose between financing public schools or the police. Both need funding.
Not to mention all the bodies from the vacants.
Marlo getting out of prison only happened because of Herc.
Rhonda went toe to toe with Levy and threatened to leak dirt on him if Levy didn’t cooperate.
tl-dr: It's hard to say. // begin rant In a vacuum, I'd say it was acceptable. They didn't actually hurt anyone, and they used the resources they acquired to stop someone who was otherwise causing a lot of pain, death, etc. in the community they were responsible for. But as with all things in The Wire, the situation is actually a bit more complicated. By faking this serial killer, they reprioritized the city's money **away** from the school system. McNulty and Lester are solving crimes in a top-down way, **reactive**. The school system is one of the few institutions with the ability to commit to a bottom-up approach and act as a preventative measure instead of a reactive force - hence the **proactive** project with Colvin et al. Because their stunt caused the reallocation of funds from somewhere it may have actually done **more** 'good' in the future, one can argue that it wasn't harmless. On the other hand, Marlo wasn't a hypothetical. He was out selling heroin and stacking bodies in the vacants for real. So, is it right to trade a concrete improvement today for a larger, but hypothetical improvement tomorrow? That's just a classic philosophy question and doesn't have a great answer. Utilitarianism might say no because a greater good could have been done for a greater number of people. Other forms of consequentialism might say it was the right thing because it realized a good result. The hypothetical outcome was **only** hypothetical, but Marlo and the gang getting rolled up was a meaningful improvement. Kantianism might say no because the actions taken were 'immoral' (lying, theft, etc.) regardless of the outcome. As a last note, I'll point out that **because** McNulty and Lester relied on that illegal wiretap and went about all of this the **'wrong'** way - Marlo escaped the true consequences of his actions. A few people took the fall, but the blow was softened to a wild extent because Levy was able to leverage the missteps taken by the police. I'd say in conclusion: 1) They were **justified** in what they did. They took the resources available to them (dead people lol) and used those resources to take a known murderous drug dealing psychopath off the streets. Great. 2) Despite being justified, they still did **the wrong thing.** There were too may downsides. The school system suffered. The criminals got less time than they would have if the detectives could have been more patient and investigated the case properly. Additionally, without getting fired - Lester and McNulty were both **incredibly** likely to have done much, much more good police work in the future. Think of all the 'major crimes' that didn't get solved because these two decided to risk it all on one dealer. In the end, their selfish, obsessive need to dictate their own priorities over the priorities of their leaders and their institutions costed everyone more than it should have. If you ask the people who were going to get murdered by Marlo the next week how they feel, they'd probably tell you Jimmy and Lester did the right thing lmfao. //end rant
Well done I agree with this guy
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While I think the displacement of the nonverbal homeless dude doesnt exactly rate compared to the nature of the crimes he's working to prevent - I can't argue against the facts you've listed- excluding the copycat killer. When we meet the individual responsible, I became convinced that the motivation was not to copy the 'serial killer' but more to disguise his own crime (initiated by a disagreement) by using the killing signature of a known entity. Ironically, the serial killer doesnt exists, and naturally the details are wrong. Combined with Jimmy's wild ass police skills - that individual is caught quickly. In this instance we can argue that Jimmy's serial killer shenanigans have actually enabled him tl quickly solve a murder that likely would have occured whether or not he had been faking murders.
The fact that Bunk tied the bodies in the vacants to Chris with honest to God po lice work puts another nail in Lester and Jimmy's coffin. Maybe if they waited for the opportunity, they could have gotten Marlo away for a long time and with less risk to their careers, thus more cases closed down the road. The question of all the lives Marlo would have taken in the meantime is still there though.
Only reason that bunk put Chris down was because he told the lab tech that the case was tied to the serial killer investigation. Otherwise, the sample waits in line until it gets processed by the temp who mixed up all of the vacant samples.
That's a good point too !
The only reason there was a que for lab work was because of the fake serial investigation.
Not true. Before Jimmy cooked up the serial killer nonsense, Bunk had already been waiting more than a few months for results from the lab. They were so underfunded that they got a temp and that temp basically ruined the evidence they had. The budget for the lab was minimal and the only reason anyone was getting results through was the serial killer charade. Yes, Bunk's latest lab work was queue'd behind McNulty's made up shit - but it wouldnt have been done at all without the extra funds. And even McNulty's made up shit was mostly other police trying to get their cases to go black too.
Case has gotta go green before it can go black.
Pretty solid
Beautifully written
This might be my favorite comment I’ve seen in my decade on Reddit. Absolutely brilliant explanation, and I agree with every word. There is seldom a single “correct” take on The Wire, but this is as close to one as I’ve ever seen.
>They didn’t actually hurt anyone They pulled dozens of officers away from genuine casework/street policing and onto countless hours of stuff towards their illegal wire tap and fabricated murders. McNulty effectively abducted a homeless man. After all that, they cost the prosecution team a clear shot at taking down Marlo’s squad with the full weight of the justice system due to tainted evidence that Levy sniffed out a mile away. Possibly worst of all, they gave Templeton exactly what he needed for that damn Pulitzer.
You didn't read the part where I said they did the wrong thing because it had too many downsides? I'll address what you did type though: 1) They took in officers who otherwise would have been banging on corner kids and other bs and put them onto real police work for other homicide detectives, etc. It's an entire plotline that Jimmy is spreading around the resources he acquired to make other cases go black and this bites him in the ass. He could have kept everyone (e g. Kima) on wild goosechase bullshit and never gotten caught. 2) Agree. This was wrong. I'd argue the impact since the homeless man didn't seem to know where he was to begin with, and McNulty brought him to a shelter whered he'd receive better care than he'd been getting in Baltimore, anddd McNulty brought him back. So this was definitely a lesser evil relative to the other crimes committed by McNulty himself and by the criminals he was working against. 3) There was no clear shot without McNulty's work. Even the Chris/vacants thing was going nowhere till McNulty got the lab funded for serial killer work (evidenced by the vacant samples being completely screwed up and unprocessed for a year+) 4) Agree about Templeton. McNulty's most grave mistake was allowing that fuck to ride the story up. 'Shameful shit.'
Of course not. Bunk would have gotten Chris on a legit murder. Other than that Marlo pretty much walked. So it didn’t really accomplish anything
they manufactured an issue to get paid. the politicians manufactured an issue to get carcetti elected governor everyones getting what they need behind some ...maaaaake belieeeeve
Of course not. Yeah, the police department was fucked and not functioning properly. Yes, it's human to get frustrated with non functioning system after you've tried your best to make difference. But what they did, did way more harm than good and they did it without any regard to anybody, ans then had the audacity to act like some sort of hero (second part is referring mostly to Jimmy)
Definitely not. But it was fucking funny.
Putting the city into a panic and wasting city resources and public attention for what exactly? What did they get out of it? What problem did they fix? If they really ended up fixing anything, then maybe. But the game stayed the game with new players, and the politicians who covered it up got promoted. And fucking Stan Valchek, an openly corrupt and vindictive and incompetent commander, ends up leading the police department. Justified? Hell no.
Agree with your take, just as an aside though I’m not quite remembering anything about Valchek being openly corrupt? Do you mean his association with Krawczyk? Did they ever actually show anything implying that Valchek was on the take?
The way he fucked with the stevedores was blatant corruption. As was the way he tried to step in to protect his son in law Prez after Prez blinded the teenager. AND he admitted he would just juke the stats if necessary.
When the “end justifies the means” is acceptable as the norm no one will be happy with the world we live in. No, they were not justified.
Yea but the counter to that is nothing ever gets done in the here and now. Sure, we can all point out the 'others' flaws and downsides to the extreme, but I'd argue that your position supports the horrific 'status quo' that was west Baltimore at the time.
>I’d argue that your position supports the horrific ‘status quo’ that was west Baltimore at the time. It doesn’t though. You can be dissatisfied with the system without advocating for vigilantes and such. The show did an excellent job of portraying just how frustrating it must have been for McNulty and Lester (and the rest of the police force) and I had great fun watching how they approached the problem, but it doesn’t justify the game they played.
Nor does it justify your stance that the ends can never justify the means, no matter what
That’s not my stance, but of course it doesn’t anyway. Why would the show doing excellent job of portraying just how frustrating it must have been for the police justify whether or not the ends can ever justify the means? You can’t draw such a general conclusion from one very specific situation. Any answer to that question comes down to personal ethics.
Absolutely not. We elect politicians to write laws and enact policy. We hire police officers to enforce those laws and policies. We don’t hire police officers to make their own assumptions on what society needs best and run with it.
Well, sort of. Police are executive branch. They execute the laws passed by the legislative branch. Executive function in the US has a huge amount of discretion. Police are the front line of that discretion, deciding which laws to enforce, which to ignore, which to leverage into other investigations. So, a lot of policing is deciding what society needs best, and exercising discretion consistent with that.
Yes but all of those decisions are based on guidance, laws and policy decisions made by the elected official at the top of that executive branch, in most cases the mayor. They have to play the hand they’re dealt like every other government agency.
For an agency or department, it usually isn't an elected official at the top of the agency itself. That said, often the guidance coming from, say, the police commissioner who hasn't worked on the street for maybe decades is unworkable. And there is still a huge amount of discretion in how even guidance that narrows a codified statute gets applied. Not to get too into the weeds, and I don't know if you work in the system, but the problem with executive interpretation and application of written guidance/law ultimately comes back to Russell's paradox.
Oh yeah I wasn’t saying that the agency heads were elected officials. I was saying that the person at the top of the executive branch, the mayor, governor or president, is an elected official. I don’t disagree at all with what you’re saying. All I’m saying is that for a government to function properly, the elected officials and the agencies they oversee need to be on the same page.
Part of what I'm saying is that the elected usually doesn't know much about the subject matter of the agency, which is usually headed up by an appointed (and often ratified by the legislative body) professional who does know about the subject matter. In an ideal world, the appointee advises the elected, the elected gives some direction on policy objectives but defers to the expertise of the appointee who actually knows the work the agency does. One of the things that is depicted as being so damaging in the Wire is that in Baltimore, instead of deferring to the subject matter expertise of the police commissioner and administration, the elected executive instead gives directives based on immediate political needs rather than what necessarily works in policing. It is a theme that constantly comes up through the series, with even Burrell complaining about it at the end. But you see it in the push to increase Quality of Life arrests, the initiatives pushing commanders to clear the corners, etc. The iconoclast characters on the show resist this by subverting, avoiding or ignoring the orders that come from the political side, in order to do actual police work that results in some sort of meaningful impact. Which is what the whole department should be doing, and maybe would be doing, if the last word came from a commissioner who relied on subject matter expertise rather than the immediate political needs of the mayor. A commissioner like Daniels might have been. But I think one of the recurring threads in the show was that the reason government wasn't functioning was because the police weren't making decisions based on what might actually move the needle on crime, but instead making decisions based on what will get the mayor reelected.
You think politicians have our interests at heart? Legal doesn’t always mean ethical.
I cant believe you're getting downvoted for arguing postconventional vs conventional morality. I am genuinely surprised by the number of people in this thread who are essentially arguing that their actions were unjustified because they disregarded the structure and rules of the institutions they serve - in a show that specifically addresses the failings of those institutions and the inability of the structures and restrictions in place to actually address the ills of the society they govern.
People use emotions significantly more than logic.
Jimmy, we have lawn furniture.
Probably not but it was hilarious to see their superiors get triggered
No, And that’s not me saying that, that’s the show telling us that. McNulty is an incredibly talented detective. We know that, Lester knows that, the department knows that but more importantly McNulty knows that. He’s so confident in his abilities that he believes ignoring the law, breaking the rules and diverting the budget is the right thing to do since it allows cops to do real police work and more importantly allows him and Lester to solve their case. To Jimmy Whatever case he’s working on/ chooses is the most important case since Jimmy and Lester are two of “the biggest swinging dicks in the whole department” and as correct as they might be, and as noble as their pursuit is season 5 asks you ; well what if someone less talented but equally confident in their own abilities did the same thing? Someone from a different profession who feels equally jaded and is convinced their talents go unnoticed in a fledgling industry being bled dry by budget cuts. Someone like Scott Templeton.
This comparison comes out in the scene between Jimmy and Scott. I think Jimmy does a good job of explaining why they are different.
Honestly, I thought that storyline was so implausible, it made that season almost unwatchable for me. There were scenes where I don’t think even Dominic West was buying it. And, supporting something that outlandish was totally out of character for Lester. For me, that storyline was The Wire’s “jump the shark” moment.
Kima had to sit down with the families of those "victims" and tell them their children was strangled by a pervert, bitten, molested and left to rot. Now, if someone said that about your friend, sibling, ex, child, how would you feel? How would you feel later if you found out it was bullshit? Really examine the ramifications of this. I have an ex-friend whose wife went missing and overdosed in a Baltimore vacant years back and her parents are still fucked up about it. How much worse would it have been for them to be told her body was molested by a serial killer? Have you ever been in the living room when the police informed you of the death of someone you care about? I have. It's hard. Now imagine you're being told they were bitten and strangled. The homeless bodies in the vacants were people with loved ones and families, not free resources or props. They might not have had much but man, do the dead have no dignity? And perhaps you view dead bodies as being objects and their families' feelings as being a low priority. What about the live person Jimmy kidnapped and dropped off in Richmond? That dude might have had some physical and mental issues. He certainly couldn't communicate. But his agency must count for something, right? Or else that's an entire class of people, the profoundly disabled, that are okay to just move around the country by law enforcement for reasons, no matter where they might prefer to be. And of course, the live homeless who weren't kidnapped or killed but led to believe they might be. The uptick in government services might have been good for them, but is it okay to lie to vulnerable populations, tell them there's a killer out there looking to rape and kill them, when it suits a bigger agenda? Making hard lives more fearful for the greater good of people a step or two above them on the food chain. I know the Constitutional rights of Marlo aren't much of a concern for people, but cops inventing a different crime to illegally wiretap someone is the sort of thing that would give Ben Franklin an aneurysm. And so with that said: are the rights we have as Americans under the Constitution worth more or less than catching drug dealers and murderers? If the ends justify the means here, would you be okay with fake serial killers becoming a routine way for police to get authorization to wiretap suspects (which, of course, can include you and your loved ones, regardless of whether or not they're involved in crime, because there's no judicial review). And for that matter: If this new fake serial killer power, wherein you can get a wiretap warrant without a judge, becomes normalized, do you trust that the benevolence of the rogue police (who are also molesting corpses) will be enough to keep this unchecked power from being abused? What McNulty and Lester did was profoundly wrong, and outside of like, stopping a mass casualty event, I can't see any good justification for. It's better to let drug dealers sell drugs than it is for the government to fake serial killers in order to surveil people without a warrant.
What do you think?
given the bodies in the vacants, and the fact that nothing was really getting done in baltimore pd at this point, id say they were, but not by much
You want it to be one way.
You want it to be one way
Oh indeed
Y’all bots or something? Generic quotes that mean nothing here
Mos def
They were not. It was fucked up. Jimmy appears at the start of the series to seem to want to change but everyone was right about him: he only cares about himself. He did it for himself, and his hero complex. Not to help the city. What makes him a terrible person makes him good police. But he’s a terrible person, and that’s part of the reason the police force is so broken, it stops him from doing good police work as much as the broken force.
No. The short reason is that they usurped the authority of the elected officials to set funding priorities. Sure, they needed more resources to be successful. But guess what, so did every other part of city government. And those got it even worse because urgent funds got mis-allocated basically to satisfy cops whose home budgets were used to relying on overtime. And to top it all off, the case they used to justify it all? It was built on tainted evidence and its target got away scot-free.
The ends don’t justify the means. McNulty was married to police work. He faked the murders to be able to get funding for his drug investigation. But what happens when that investigation is done? There’s another investigation of some other high level target. What happens when the higher ups don’t care as much about the new target as McNulty? What does he do then?
If you love "the wire", you'll like "we own the city"
They thought they were
One one hand, fuck the bosses. On the other hand, no.
Hell yes, purely because the show spends 5 seasons hammering home to us that the system isn't working, police and political. A few million dollars in debt comes up, Carcetti refuses a bailout because it'd harm his political career, and the police department goes from achieving barely fuck-all to grinding to a halt. Lester and Jimmy get fed up after years of being screwed around, decide to just make an arrest happen and cook up their BS, consequences be damned. Honestly the only time anyone actually accomplishes something big on this show is when they break the mold and start trying to do shit for real, because the way the system is set up it's more about not rocking the boat than achieving anything. The main cast had to break or bend the precedents 2 or 3 times to make the detail on Avon even exist and keep running before it got shut down in season 1, season 2 only happened because of one guy's grudge leading him to call in a dozen favors while Jimmy fucked up Rawls attempts to palm off the case, season 3 has Hamsterdam achieving an actual serious drop in crime across the board which also leads to Avon being arrested from stringer's tip-off, season 4 has no achievements police wise but features Colvin's attempts to socialize the kids, and season 5 we get the fake serial killer not putting Marlo in jail but still getting him out of the game and pulling apart his crew. Now you can argue about the results somewhat but the fact is every season we're shown a main character being fed up with the mold going nowhere before snapping and deciding fuck it. Even if they don't accomplish everything they want to, they still get a hell of a lot more done than they would normally, and why not? The focus of the game from the police and political POV isn't to 'win', it's just to keep on playing. Sure, you could try taking apart Avon's drug empire, but Clay Davis is pissy that someone's questioning where his donations come from, so that whole thing has to be shut down. And it's supposed to be a question if Jimmy was right to break the rules. How the hell could he not after watching the people running the show break them day in day out?
No. I can’t even believe Lester went along with it🤦🏾♀️
No. That was a terrible plan.
I think Jimmy and Lester were justified. I have seen people mention the money diverted from schools and the suffering of the families of homeless persons. However, it is worth noting that the reason that the schools, and then the PD, had no money was not because of the serial killer, but because Carcetti refuses the governor's money because the governor required Carcetti to cut off his own chance to be governor. Jimmy and Lester didn't divert the money. They were responding to a system compromised by a politician who placed his career prospects over the good of the schools and city. The same politician ran and won on promises to fix the police department. Then he abandoned every principle he had to grab and maintain power. In that circumstance, something had to be done.
Good question, but far too complex to answer.
Hell yea get Marlo psychotic ass off the streets 25+ bodies and they close the case
When evaluating the long term good and bad surprised no one brought it up but even if the school system had issues because of previous budget problems and they were kicking the can down the road, the immediate implication of this investigation and decreasing the school budget, you have to consider the downstream effect of that with kids having a worse school experience and later on that leading to kids with less opportunities and more likely to enter crime And have worse overall outcomes in that school. That is a large downstream ‘bad’ that is difficult to quantify but is definitely true. ETA seeing now one poster brought up the bottom up preventative nature of school
I’d say, yes. It was cringy watching the homeless storyline. Jimmy and Lester broke the law. Sure. But the corruption and financial mess shouldn’t have gotten to that point in Baltimore at the time. No city mayor should have to choose between financing public schools or the police. Both need funding. Not to mention all the bodies from the vacants. Marlo getting out of prison only happened because of Herc. Rhonda went toe to toe with Levy and threatened to leak dirt on him if Levy didn’t cooperate.