Chicago Blues: Torn from the Pages of the Wire

Mayor Carcetti, "The Wire"

No one watching the current show in Chicago who has watched "The Wire" can objectively see what is going on without nodding his/her head and saying, "Oh, I know exactly what is happening here."  

In "The Wire"  there were so many scenes which portended what happened to Luquan McDonald on that Chicago street and almost as importantly, what happened afterward. "The Wire" was mostly about what happened afterward. You rarely actually saw the "video" i.e., the shooting. What you saw was the body on the street or in the townhouse and the police hierarchy trying to pretend it wasn't there. 

The boy was murdered by a policeman. Fellow policemen out of loyalty to the brother cop, or because their bosses ordered it, charged into the Burger King across the street to rip out the security camera videos of that event, thus engaging in the purest form of "obstruction of justice," otherwise known as criminal cover up.  Police investigators,  who were supposed to attend the autopsy saw nothing in the 16 bullet wounds, half to the back, to make  them doubt the policeman's story that he fired in self defense.  All of this was buried by a determined police hierarchy for a while and they tried to shield the mayor, who was in a tight re election race, but ultimately, the head cop gets fired and now the mayor may be close behind at the exit door. 

None of this would have happened had it not been for an independent journalist who kept pressing for release of the videotape. The wonder is the police video was not destroyed.  How many cops and how many levels of police saw that tape?  Why was the family paid hush money so quickly and did the mayor know what that money was meant to hide? 

In Canada, and in some US cities, investigators who are not police are called upon to investigate every killing by a police officer. Why is this not universally true in the United States? Police unions oppose this, but when did anyone in this country start listening to unions? (For better or for worse.)

It is difficult to watch Chicago now and to remember you are not watching just another episode from "The Wire." You feel as if you know these people, the cops, the Black youth, the reporters, the lawyers.  You have to keep telling yourself, "No, this actually is not fiction; it's just life imitating fiction."

Of course, "The Wire" was not fiction, either. It was a distillation of real stories given a fictional form, but you know David Simon and his police officer partner, Ed Burns, who wrote and produced the stories, had seen this all before.     

Mayor Emanuel