Since the reign of Donald Pomerleau, the homegrown management of the Baltimore department had devolved to mediocrity, but it was only amid the cocaine wars that the cost of such was revealed. It was one thing to have a half-senile commissioner caretaking a viable department in 1981, when crackhouses and speedballs were just a rumor in Baltimore. A decade later, actual leadership was a fundamental need and, for the first time since 1966, the city hired a commissioner from the outside, giving him a mandate to clean house.
He did. But in the worst way, because Thomas Frazier, arriving with an air of supreme confidence from San Jose, almost singlehandedly managed to destroy the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit in the process.
For one thing, Frazier proved indifferent to the fact that inside every police agency in America there are two hierarchies. The first is the chain of command, where rank itself is the chief determinant; sergeants learn to supplicate before lieutenants, who prostrate themselves before majors, who genuflect before colonels, who kiss the haunches of deputy commissioners. That hierarchy is necessary to the form and it can never be wholly disregarded.
But the alternate hierarchy-equally essential-is one of expertise, and it exists for the department’s technicians, those whose skill at a specific job requires due deference.
This defines a homicide detective.
Yet incredibly, Frazier came to Baltimore and immediately declared that the rotation of police officers from one assignment to the next would constitute his plan for revitalizing the city department. No officer, he declared, should remain in the same assignment for more than three years.
Never mind that it takes a homicide detective-not to mention other departmental investigators and technicians-at least that long to fully learn his craft and become effective. And never mind that rotation threatened the professional standing of every man in the homicide unit. Frazier cited his own career as a justification, declaring that he had, after three years in any assignment, become bored and desirous of new challenges.
Rotation chased some of the best men from the city, as they departed to investigative jobs with the federal government and the surrounding counties. When, for example, Gary Childs and Kevin Davis decided to leave before submitting to the policy, I interviewed Frazier and asked him how he felt about such losses.
“These are guys who can carry a squad,” I said.
“Why does anyone need to be carried? Why can’t every man in homicide be the best?”
As hyperbole, it sounds great. But the truth about the Baltimore homicide unit-even when it was at its best in the 1970s and 1980s, when clearance rates were well above the national averages-is that some detectives were brilliant, some were competent and some were notably ineffective.
Yet in every squad there seemed to be a Worden, a Childs, a Davis or a Garvey to center the half dozen men and keep watch over weaker colleagues. With thirty detectives and six sergeants, it was possible for squad supervisors to monitor the struggling detectives, to pair them with proven veterans, to ensure that cases didn’t so easily slip between the cracks.
Frazier’s other strategy-apart from simply chasing talent from the department-was to assign more detectives to the sixth floor. More squads. More new detectives. Eventually, the violent crimes task force was co-mingled with homicide on the sixth floor and another thirty bodies wandered to and fro amid the casework.
More detectives, less responsibility. And now, when a detective took a phone call on a murder, more likely than not he didn’t know which squad was working the case or what the capabilities of a new detective actually were. There had always been rookies-one or two a squad-and the veterans would look out for them, nurture them, making sure they weren’t given whodunits until they had gone out on a dozen calls as secondaries, or maybe even handled a dunker or two on their own. Now, whole squads were comprised of first-year men, and with the continuing departure of veterans the clearance rate fell dramatically.
A few years later, it was well below 50 percent, with the actual conviction rate hovering at about half that. And as in any institutional enterprise, once the expertise goes, it does not come back.
“They ruined us,” Garvey told me before putting in his papers. “This was a great unit and it was like they had a plan to ruin it.”
For my part, I had come to feel much the same in my own world, having seen some of the best reporters at my newspaper depart for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers-chased by an institutional arrogance that was every bit equal to that of the police department.
Struck, Wooten, Alvarez, Zorzi, Littwin, Thompson, Lippman, Hyman-some of the best reporters the Baltimore Sun had were marginalized, then bought out, shipped out and replaced with twenty-four-year-old acolytes, who, if they did nothing else, would never make the mistake of having an honest argument with newsroom management. In a time of growth, when the chance to truly enhance the institution was at hand, the new regime at the Sun hired about as much talent as they dispatched. And in the end, when the carpetbaggers finally departed, their mythology of heroic renewal intact, they had managed to achieve three Pulitzers in about a dozen years. During the previous dozen, the newspaper’s morning and evening editions achieved exactly the same number.
Listening to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by-a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom-you will eventually be betrayed.
It seemed very Greek the more I thought about it. The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional. In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings-be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers-are destined to matter less and less.
After watching what was done to my newspaper, and to the Baltimore homicide unit, I began to write the pilot for a new HBO drama. The Wire, for better or for worse, has occupied my time since.
Just after reading the manuscript for Homicide, Terry McLarney mailed me a single sheet of white bond paper. Atop that solitary page:
“The Book. Volume II.”
And then the sentence, “My God. They’ve all been transferred. I think I see now what it is they were trying to tell me.”
That was the only shot fired across my bow before publication, the only warning-however lighthearted-that the book might prove problematic for those it characterized.
And in the wake of Frazier’s rotation policy, as well as other departures of veteran detectives unrelated to that policy, McLarney’s dry, comic lament might certainly seem prophetic.
But there is a corresponding truth, and one that also bears noting: In 1998, looking back a decade to the year when I followed these men with pen and notepad akimbo, it was accurate to say that more than three-quarters of them were no longer in the Baltimore city homicide unit. But, looking back ten years from my moment as a police intern, it is also true that three-quarters of the detectives who had manned the unit in 1978 were also gone. And they departed, of course, without any book having been written about them.
Time itself is a means of attrition.
And, in time, Baltimore became comfortable with its depiction in both Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and the television drama that followed. The mayor appeared on the show; Maryland’s governor as well. The actors themselves came to be regarded as resident Baltimoreans, or Baltimorons as some of us like to call ourselves. Over the last decade and a half, I’ve signed copies of the book for the city’s politicians, for its civic leaders, for its lawyers, its cops, its criminals.