David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart

My initial instinct on seeing the headline was "it's not like the Wire made a strong case for police competence!" - but on further reading, the detectives in question were treated in a much more positive light in "Homicide: Life on the Street" by David Simon which pre-dated the Wire by a few years.

An interesting parenthetical in the article:

> (In an email, Simon wrote that he would now reconsider his skepticism about the likelihood of wrongful convictions: “I minimized the chance of an investigative or prosecutorial error — never mind purposed misconduct — making it all the way to a jury and conviction; that chance is more substantial than I once believed.”)

I think it's important to keep in mind the context of when some of these arrests and convictions occured. This is not a judgement but rather an observation: Is it possible that when violent crime escalates night after night, that the hand of the law gets larger, and larger?

Thus it becomes a perceived war zone for the police, where it's now arrest and convict, no matter whom, in order to do whatever it takes to stop the crime. I think broken windows was an example of this. Rights were violated, people wrongfully convicted. When the public and the politicians are demanding that the police do something, what's to stop the overreach?