I have never seen the HBO series, “The Wire,” but from what I heard in an interview I heard re-played this morning between the executive producer of the series, David Simon (a former big-city news reporter), and Bill Moyers, I put the five-season series in my Netflix queue as soon as I could.
During the interview, Moyers and Simon talk about the American city, politics, police, public education and, as they say, our propensity to ‘juke' [manipulate] urban statistics. In it, Simon makes stunning and insightful commentary on our current economic system and the "war on drugs":
SIMON: The people most affected by [our current economic system] are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don't think-- since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.
MOYERS: Which says?
SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.
MOYERS: But here's the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound, but are numbing. I mean, here's an excerpt I read just this morning: "Over the past 20 years, the elite one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation's income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent. But their tax burden shrank by about one-third." Now those facts tell us something very important. That the rich got richer as their tax rates shrunk. But it doesn't seem to start people's blood rushing, you know? Another topic they take on during the interview is this matter of “juking” statistics whether they be crime data or public school test scores.
MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats."
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[A dialogue from “The Wire:”]
PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.
"PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI (a former cop now working as a teacher): I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
COLLEAGUE: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
PREZ: Juking the stats.
COLLEAGUE: Excuse me?
PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.
COLLEAGUE: Wherever you go, there you are.
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SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.
MOYERS: And you say that's driving the war on drugs, though, right? The stats, not the-
SIMON: Dope on the table. Stats, you know, "We've made so many arrests." I mean, they used to ride around Baltimore under one administration, and say, "If we can make 54 arrests a day, we'll break the-- we'll have an all-time record for drug arrests."
SIMON: Some of the arrests, well, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that. So, I would be-- I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was, you know, you would look outward. But if you looked inward you'd see that the same game is played everywhere. That nobody's actually in the business of doing what the institution's supposed to do.
Simon also has some harsh things to say about the “war” on drugs. When Moyers asked him what he would do about the drug problem Simon said:
SIMON: Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war's war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.
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As I see it, the ramifications of not only the spiritual heart of our nation but our very survival is put into question. What is up for discussion her is efficacy of our system of government. This entire interview bears careful reading (the interview transcript between Moyers and Simon, dated April 17, 2009, can be read at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/transcript1.html
Beware, I am sure you will find it as provocative as I did.
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