Part 1:

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with David Simon, the man behind The Wire, what some have described as the best television series ever broadcast. Nearly a decade ago in Slate, Jacob Weisberg wrote, “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” President Obama met with David Simon earlier this year and described himself as a big fan.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: At the front end, I’ve got to tell you, I’m a huge fan of The Wire. I think it’s one of the greatest, not just television shows, but pieces of art, in the last couple of decades. I was a huge fan of it.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama, speaking at the White House during a meeting in March with David Simon. In The Wire, Simon captured the city of Baltimore from the angles of street-level drug dealers, beat police officers, journalists covering corrupt politicians. David Simon said he aimed to portray how, quote, “raw, unencumbered capitalism” devalues human beings. He created the show after leaving The Baltimore Sun, where he worked on the city desk for over a decade. The Wire helped launch a new national discussion about the failings of the criminal justice system and the so-called war on drugs. In 2011, then-Attorney General Eric Holder urged Simon to do another season of The Wire. Simon responded he was prepared to do so if the Justice Department would, quote, “reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition.”

Well, after The Wire ended, David Simon went to create Treme, looking at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which hit the city 10 years ago this week. In 2010, Simon was awarded a MacArthur Genius award. In a statement summarizing his work, the MacArthur Foundation said, quote, “With the nuance and scope of novels, Simon’s recent series have explored the constraints that poverty, corruption and broken social systems place on the lives of a compelling cast of characters, each vividly realized with complicated motives, frailties, and strengths.”

David Simon’s latest project is titled Show Me a Hero. It’s six-part mini-series now airing on HBO. It looks at what happened in Yonkers, New York, in the 1980s when Yonkers was faced with a federal court order to build a small number of low-income housing units in the white neighborhoods of his town.

NICK WASICSKO: [played by Oscar Isaac] Well, don’t tell anybody, but I always wanted to be the mayor. I used to talk about it all the time growing up. The other kids used to call me the mayor.

NAY NOE WASICSKO: [played by Carla Quevedo] Really.

NICK WASICSKO: It wasn’t a compliment.

UNIDENTIFIED: The city intentionally segregated its housing for 40 years.

UNIDENTIFIED: The whole damn city government’s white.

MARY DORMAN: [played by Catherine Keener] This judge wants to take low-income housing and put it here, in East Yonkers.

HANK SPALLONE: [played by Alfred Molina] The trash, the drugs. We will die from what the city is trying to shove down our throat.

UNIDENTIFIED: I live here, and I am nothing like what they describe.

VINNI RESTIANO: [played by Winona Ryder] So what are you going to do?

NICK WASICSKO: It’s that guy from Yonkers again, asking if he can get any help from the state of New York.

PROTESTERS: No justice, no peace!

NICK WASICSKO: The matter with these people?

ROBERT MAYHAWK: [played by Clarke Peters] You wanted to live somewhere better, but everything has a cost.

HANK SPALLONE: It’s time you recognized your failure as a leader.

NORMA O’NEAL: [played by LaTanya Richardson Jackson] You want to live where people were angry at you?

NICK WASICSKO: You know, it’s all property values and life and liberty. Underneath it all, it’s fear. I played into that fear, too.

JUDGE LEONARD B. SAND: [played by Bob Balaban] Quite a year for you, Mr. Mayor. Justice is not about popularity.

NICK WASICSKO: No, it’s not. But politics is.

AMY GOODMAN: Highlights from the new HBO miniseries, Show Me a Hero. Joining us for the hour is the show’s creator, David Simon.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DAVID SIMON: Thanks for having me back.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Tell us the story of Yonkers and desegregation.

DAVID SIMON: Well, it was one of the first places where a sort of a new generation of public housing policy was undertaken, which is to say there were a lot of mistakes that happened in the '50s, ’60s, ’40s even, in terms of the construction of public housing. Condensing everything into high-rise projects or mass—sort of mass incarcerating your poor in very tiny areas, like the—you know, Robert Taylor or Cabrini-Green in Chicago, or in my city in Baltimore, Lexington Terrace or Murphy Homes, it proved incredibly destructive and destabilizing to those neighborhoods, and it creates almost permanent ghettos. And so, the new revolution of scattered site housing kind of began in Yonkers, which was to say, a few units here, a few units there, don't destabilize the neighborhood, truly try to integrate your poor into the rest of society.

And it actually was a quiet revolution that was successful. Unfortunately, everybody who heard that 200 units had to be built in white areas, because of a court settlement, imagined the past and not the future. And so, it aroused incredible white anger, in the late '80s and early ’90s, and incredible upheaval. And you could not convince anyone to risk even the slightest of their property values or of the status quo in order to try to achieve the result. And so, Yonkers blew up. And it was—in winning the victory that they did, the cost, the political cost, was so exhausting that it wasn't replicated elsewhere around the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip from Show Me a Hero, showing one of these heated meetings in Yonkers over public housing.

PROTESTERS: Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!

NICK WASICSKO: [played by Oscar Isaac] As indicated by our last vote, we elected to appeal the affordable housing portion of the judge’s order to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court has refused—

PROTESTER: Appeal all of it, you coward!

NICK WASICSKO: Roll call, Mr. Clerk. Roll call.

CLERK: [played by Ray Iannicelli] Mayor Wasicsko.

NICK WASICSKO: Aye.

CLERK: Vice Mayor Spallone.

HANK SPALLONE: [played by Alfred Molina] No.

CLERK: Majority Leader Cola.

CHARLES COLA: [played by Daniel Oreskes] No.

CLERK: Minority Leader Longo.

NICHOLAS LONGO: [played by Jim Bracchitta] No.

CLERK: Councilmember Fagan.

EDWARD FAGAN: [played by Allan Steele] No.

CLERK: Councilmember Chema.

PETER CHEMA: [played by Danny Mastrogiorgio] No.

CLERK: Councilmember Oxman.

HARRY OXMAN: [played by Dan Ziskie] Abstain.

CLERK: I have one aye, five nays, one abstention. The measure fails.

NICK WASICSKO: Meeting adjourned.

AMY GOODMAN: There you have one of those moments. Now, let’s go back, David Simon. Talk about what forced the desegregation.

DAVID SIMON: It was a court ruling by a federal court that was upheld by—well, it was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, but—

AMY GOODMAN: But this was a lawsuit brought by the NAACP?

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely. It came out of the Carter Justice Department in '79, was the original suit. And then the NAACP joined it as a friend of the court. And it was fought—it actually wasn't settled completely until 2007. That’s how long the litigation took. Basically, what was proven, beyond any doubt—I mean, it was upheld by a three-judge panel, including two Reagan appointees, the original decision. But what was proven was that Yonkers, like many American cities, like most American cities, used their federal housing money to purposely and willfully segregate their low-income housing. They used it for racial hypersegregation. And the case was proven by going back to, you know, even the minutes of the Housing Authority, for decades. You would hear people saying bluntly, “Well, don’t put it anywhere else but here. We don’t want—we don’t want blacks moving into that neighborhood or this neighborhood. Keep it”—so they built every single unit of low-income housing in one square mile of Yonkers.

AMY GOODMAN: So they used federal money—

DAVID SIMON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to further segregate the city.

DAVID SIMON: Right. And, of course, you know, anybody who’s read Nick Lemann’s Promised Land or, notably, recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations piece in The Atlantic, the case is definitive that—I mean, just definitive, that the country as a whole has used social engineering to create this hypersegregated world. I mean, we had done this as a matter of policy, of plan, of purpose for the last 40 years, 50 years, up to this point.

So here comes the NAACP and the Justice Department, that basically says, “Look, you took the money, and you did this, you know, contrary to Brown v. Board of Education. You know, this is a Plessy v. Ferguson type behavior. You can’t do this. This is depriving people of their constitutional rights.” And the remedy, of course, was desegregate your public housing stock. And they asked to build 200 units in a city of 200,000 on the white side of the Saw Mill River Parkway.

AMY GOODMAN: And it was going to be in different places.

DAVID SIMON: Right. Well, that’s the part that eluded the opponents, which was, there were people who had learned something about public housing and about the mistakes of public housing and of this very active hypersegregating all of your poor into one small area. And it was the beginning of scattered site housing and defensible space theory and a lot of things that actually work in terms of integrating the poor with the rest of society.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the difference between segregation and hypersegregation?

DAVID SIMON: Degree, degree. I mean, I would say that, you know, certainly, when you are trying to place every single person of color in a context where they are not interacting with the rest of society, if you were to go to look at the Schlobohm high-rise projects, which are still there in West Yonkers, they’re actually built in this incredible gully in the middle of West Yonkers with a high retaining wall, so that—I mean, there’s a 20-foot retaining wall around it. I mean, you look at it, and you realize the poor are being made to—

AMY GOODMAN: They are—it’s like a walled-in community.

DAVID SIMON: It’s like in a gully, and there’s a 20-foot wall that surrounds it. I mean, it is so segregated from the rest of Yonkers that the intent is absolutely clear, which is: Let’s make no mistake, this is where we took the money—we took the—for the housing stock. And by the way, the people—let’s be honest, the reason cities started taking the federal money was these projects originally—not the Schlobohm, but the ones before that, the low-rises, Mulford Gardens, places like that—in every city, they were for white people. They were for people struggling to hold families together at the end of the Depression, and some of the earlier projects go back to the ’30s. And particularly after the war, after World War II, they were for returning veterans. And they were heralded. Public housing was heralded as a viable and advantageous federal policy. It was only when it gravitated to people of color, when they became the next immigrant wave, either from the South or from other countries, that it became problematic politically.

AMY GOODMAN: David, I want to go to another clip from Show Me a Hero. Here, a representative with the Housing Education Relocation Enterprise program speaks with the Mary Dorman, a main character in Show Me a Hero, played by Catherine Keener, an older East Yonkers resident.

ROBERT MAYHAWK: [played by Clarke Peters] As I began to explain, I run a group called the Housing Education Relocation Enterprise, or HERE. We have been commissioned by the Yonkers Housing Authority to help these tenants move into the new homes—thank you—and to do so in the best possible way for the tenants and for the existing neighborhood residents. We intend to make sure that what is going to happen, happens in the best possible way for everyone. May I ask, Mrs. Dorman, how do you feel about the housing presently?

MARY DORMAN: [played by Catherine Keener] Honestly?

ROBERT MAYHAWK: But of course.

MARY DORMAN: Honestly, I don’t—I don’t believe in it.

ROBERT MAYHAWK: You don’t believe in the purpose of the housing, or you don’t believe that the housing is coming to your neighborhood?

MARY DORMAN: I don’t believe in the idea of it. I know the housing is coming.

ROBERT MAYHAWK: It is. Oh, pardon me. You are exactly right, it is going to happen. And what is left for all of us to decide is exactly what it will be, or more importantly, perhaps, what it will not be.

AMY GOODMAN: This woman, Mary Dorman, is a very interesting figure, one of the leading activists against desegregation, who begins to change, David Simon.

DAVID SIMON: Yeah, she had an incredible journey. I got to meet her before she passed, because we started research on this project back in about 2002, 2003.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s based on the former New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin’s book.

DAVID SIMON: Lisa Belkin’s book. And Bill Zorzi and I, who worked on the scripts, we felt the need to—we have to get the voices, as well, as well as the prose story. So we went to Yonkers, and Bill, particularly, dug into the story, and of course he met Mary. And Lisa tells a fascinating story about reading to Mary her book, when she was finished with the manuscript. Mary is reading visions of herself from when she was one of the most vocal and furious opponents of the public housing, and she denied saying those things. And Lisa had to go back and show her the record, what she had said at hearings and at protests. And Mary, at that point in life, didn’t recognize herself. She didn’t recognize her earlier version of herself. She was astonished. It really was a hero’s journey for her. And she’s—you know, Catherine Keener plays the turn so beautifully.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you show the wrath of this section, this segment of the white community against the desegregation.

DAVID SIMON: Right. People think it’s hyperbolic. People think that we sort of exaggerated it. All you’ve got to do is go to—there are documentaries, there’s film footage of the council hearings. I mean, we’re going verbatim.

AMY GOODMAN: But what about the black community and where they stood on this? There’s a point early on where you have—I think he was a leader of the NAACP, sort of throwing up his hands and saying, “This isn’t even worth it anymore, 200 houses.”

DAVID SIMON: There was a level of exhaustion. By the time we come into the story, we’re at 1987. And there had been a remedy ordered in 1985. The case had dragged on for six years. There had been repeated attempts to settle the case out of court, that had failed because the Yonkers City Council couldn’t even approve one unit of public housing anywhere, so that, you know, even more benign—I mean, there was one settlement that had called for only 100 units, but the council vetoed that. So, you know, you’re talking about a level of exhaustion on the part of black activists, that by ’87 the attorney, one of the attorneys who brought the case, Michael Sussman, he told us he clearly felt as if the fact that this was incredible precedent, legal precedent, that they had established, that cities that did this were—the remedy had to be an attempt to desegregate, even on the part of the advocates, there was a level of exhaustion because of the resistance.

And there is to this day. Yonkers stands as—if you go to those townhouses that they built, they’re not a source of additional crime. They didn’t bring down the neighborhoods. The property values remain fairly constant. In fact, they’re increasing now because of Yonkers’ availability, a sort of renaissance downtown. But that’s the victory on the ground. The emotional cost of it—you know, I mean, the federal government had the—the same dynamic in Dallas right now, going on right now, is going on in Dallas, and the federal government doesn’t have the—HUD doesn’t have the stomach to fight it through. They’re basically pulling up stakes and giving up on the case.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the judge forced this through by basically saying, “We will bankrupt Yonkers if you don’t follow through.”

DAVID SIMON: Well, yeah. Yonkers was in contempt.

AMY GOODMAN: Every day another fine.

DAVID SIMON: At a certain point—I mean, at a certain point, there had been this decision, it had been appealed, the appeal had been upheld, and Yonkers still wasn’t obeying a federal court order. At that point, a federal judge has remarkable power, if he wants to use it, to enforce an order, to enforce a legal order. And Yonkers was—he was going to fine the city to the point of bankruptcy. And Yonkers still couldn’t get four votes on the council to approve a housing plan.

AMY GOODMAN: But you’re not seeing the backbone of Obama’s HUD, of the Obama administration, in Dallas to push this forward?

DAVID SIMON: Well, not in Dallas. I mean, I think they’ve done—you know, they’re using, I think, these last two years very effectively. And I think you’re seeing—you know, the opening up of the data for local groups to now pursue these cases on their own, I think, is a very effective thing that they’ve done. But, yeah, I think in Dallas you’ve seen, yeah, I would have to say, a lack of backbone. And there haven’t—you know, if you think these problems are—that we did something that’s 25 years old and it’s an anachronism, two towns up the Hudson right now, in Tarrytown, this same rhetoric, the same demagoguery, same guys running for office claiming that they can in some way turn back this decision. They’re finding it in Tarrytown now instead of Yonkers. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And in Yonkers, the mayor, Nick Wasicsko, he ran on an anti-desegregation platform, and simply because of the judge saying he was going to bankrupt the city—I mean, it wasn’t a moral awakening, though it came to be one, it seems like.

DAVID SIMON: It came to be one. Nick grew, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.

DAVID SIMON: You know, obviously, we spent a lot of time talking to his widow, Nay Wasicsko. And he came to see that—you know, in the beginning what it was, was a political opportunity to run to the right of the existing mayor, who was ready to comply. And Nick was arguing that they should still exhaust every possible appeal, even though everyone in city government knew there were no grounds for appeal. So, almost before, I would say a couple weeks before his inauguration, after he won, running to the right of the mayor, the call comes from the lawyers, and they say, “We lost the appeal. You’ve got to do it.” And Nick then had to turn around to the voters and say, “I know what I ran on, but, hey, we lost the case. Now we have to build the units.” And that was not well received.

AMY GOODMAN: And what captured your imagination? I mean, you dig in. You throw yourself completely into these projects. In a moment, we’re going to talk about New Orleans in Treme and then The Wire.

DAVID SIMON: I thought this piece was—you know, there’s been a lot of writing about the American pathology of race and how it’s an overlay on all of our urban problems, our failure to deal with it. I mean, it still—it remains for the 21st century the most fundamental question of, well, if we don’t get this right, it’s problematic that we’re going to get the city right. If we don’t get the city right, I don’t see how this society becomes anything but second-rate, because we are an urban people. And, you know, if you’ve read anything about the construct of segregation and what it’s done in terms of creating these two separate Americas—you know, Andrew Hacker’s book, Two Nations, or The Promised Land by Nick Lemann or—I mean, there’s just so much reporting that basically says this is the great stumbling block of American society. It’s what we’ve—you know, we’ve wasted an incredible amount of treasure, time and lives because we can’t get this right.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to David Simon for the hour, the former Baltimore Sun journalist. Baltimore Sun figures prominently in the remarkable series, The Wire, and is—also spent a lot of time in New Orleans. We’re going to talk about Treme next. It’s the 10th anniversary of Katrina. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Part 2:

In his acclaimed TV show “The Wire,” David Simon captured the city of Baltimore from the angles of street-level drug dealers, beat police officers and journalists covering corrupt politicians. Earlier this year, President Obama described “The Wire” as “one of the greatest, not just television shows, but pieces of art, in the last couple of decades.” Simon said he aimed to portray how “raw, unencumbered capitalism” devalues human beings. Nearly a decade ago in Slate, Jacob Weisberg wrote: “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/26/the_drug_war_has_to_end

https://youtu.be/i92kBqmTuXE

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The Pogues’ Philip Chevron’s “Faithful Departed.” This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest for the hour is the acclaimed television writer, producer, journalist, David Simon. You like that song? You like The Pogues?

DAVID SIMON: I love The Pogues. I love Phil Chevron, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re doing a new project with—

DAVID SIMON: Phil Chevron actually was a fan of the American musical, of all things. And he came to myself and my wife, Laura Lippman, and George Pelecanos, writer I work with, and he was interested in seeing if The Pogues’ music could be adapted for an American musical and—for a musical, I should say. And we went to work on it. And the draft that we currently have, at least, has sufficient merit that The Public Theater here in New York has picked it up as a project to work on and try to develop.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, right now, let’s talk about The Wire, about the city of Baltimore, your city, which has been described—The Wire has been described as the best show on television, the best television series ever broadcast. USA Today called it “astounding.” It was known for creatively explaining some of the most complex principles of capitalism and industry. This is a conversation between three street-level drug dealers about who’s really profiting from McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.

WALLACE: [played by Michael B. Jordan] Man, these [bleep] is right, yo.

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: [played by Tray Chaney] Mm-hmm.

WALLACE: Mm, good with the hot sauce, too, yo.

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: Most definite.

WALLACE: Yo, D. You want some nuggets?

D’ANGELO BARKSDALE: [played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr.] Not really, man.

WALLACE: Man, whoever invented these, he off the hook.

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: What?

WALLACE: Mm. [bleep] got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. 'Til he came along, [bleep] be chewin' on drumsticks and [bleep], gettin’ they fingers all greasy. He said, “Later for the bone. Let’s nugget that meat up and make some real money.”

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: You think the man got paid?

WALLACE: Who?

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: The man who invented these.

WALLACE: [bleep], he richer than a mother [bleep].

D’ANGELO BARKSDALE: Why? You think he get a percentage?

WALLACE: Why not?

D’ANGELO BARKSDALE: [bleep], please. The man who invented them things, just some sad ass down at the basement of McDonald’s, thinkin’ up some [bleep] to make some money for the real players.

MALIK ”POOT” CARR: Naw, man, that ain’t right.

D’ANGELO BARKSDALE: [bleep] “right.” It ain’t about right, it’s about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, “Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin’ chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I’m gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you”?

WALLACE: [bleep].

D’ANGELO BARKSDALE: Man, the [bleep] who invented them things still workin’ in the basement for regular wage, thinkin’ up some [bleep] to make the fries taste better, some [bleep] like that. Believe.

WALLACE: Still had the idea though.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from The Wire.

DAVID SIMON: That’s pretty much macroeconomics. That’s—yeah, that’s capitalism as it actually exists.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you were doing with The Wire. For someone who has just come to this country, knows nothing about it, and it has a huge cult following.

DAVID SIMON: Yeah, it’s hard to sort of sum up 60 hours, but if I had to put it in a paragraph, it’s a city in which a rigged game is demonstrated, and power routes itself and money routes itself away from our characters. It’s a critique of modern capitalism, of our unencumbered capitalism or only modestly encumbered capitalism, as the case may be. And it’s also a—on a more practical sort of episode-to-episode level, it’s an argument against the drug war and the over-policing of the poor. And I thought if it could accomplish anything, maybe it could get an argument started about the drug war, because having covered it for most of my time as a reporter—it was probably the biggest issue I covered—there was nothing about it that was functional. It was the most dystopic policy. Everything it claimed to try to address, in terms of illegal drug use or the bad that drugs do, it had very little effect on, and instead it became a war on the poor. And I didn’t believe that at first. I came to it sort of innocently as a young reporter, but by the time I had finished covering it and written The Corner and done the work I had done, I was unalterably against it as policy. So, it was a critique of the drug war, specifically. But overlaying that was an argument that we’ve created, almost by will, these two separate Americas, and the economic rules that we apply to one don’t work in the other. And we know that, and we’re comfortable with that.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about two different Americas. You say your country, America, is a “horror show.” You’ve been quoted as saying that.

DAVID SIMON: You know, in terms of—you know, my country is a lot of different things. I’m not speaking of the entire—you know, I’m an American. I wish to affirm as an American. But economically and politically and socially, the fact that we are these two separate Americas traveling distinctly different paths—you know, I live in one—I live in Baltimore. I live in a city that I love. I live 20 blocks away from the world of The Wire. And, you know, I mean, just on a level of violence, my chance of being murdered in Baltimore, being white, is the same as if I was living in Omaha, Nebraska, right now. Same—it doesn’t matter that I live in Baltimore. I live in, you know, downtown Baltimore—does not matter. If I was a black male between the ages of 16 and 45, I think homicide would be the second leading cause of death. You know, it’s the outcomes in these different places that are so predicated on the economic privations and on lack of power and the fact that the entire industrial base which used to support my city has moved elsewhere and is not part of our economy anymore. And what remains behind, you know, the sort of vestigial service economy, it serves some of us, and it doesn’t even reach—it has no remote connection to the lives of other of us. So, we are building these two separate societies in incredible proximity to each other. It’s amazing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to your meeting with President Obama at the White House. After he praised your work on The Wire, saying it was his favorite television show, President Obama discussed the fallout from the U.S. crackdown on nonviolent drug offenses.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: A consequence of that was this massive trend towards incarceration, even of nonviolent drug offenders. And I saw this—during the period that you were reporting and then, you know, starting to write for television, I saw this from the perspective of a state legislator, this just explosion of incarcerations, disproportionately African-American and Latino.

DAVID SIMON: Yeah.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And the challenge, which, you know, you depict in your show, is, folks go in, at great expense to the state, many times trained to become more hardened criminals while in prison, come out and are basically unemployable—

DAVID SIMON: Right.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: —and end up looping back in.

DAVID SIMON: Permanently a part of the other America—

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Exactly.

DAVID SIMON: —and can’t be pulled back. Nobody incarcerates their population at this level.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right.

DAVID SIMON: And to look at it, when I came in as a police reporter, the federal prison population was about 34 percent violent offenders.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Yeah.

DAVID SIMON: When I left as a police reporter 13 years later, it was about 7 percent.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right.

DAVID SIMON: So these were less violent people getting longer sentences. Of course, there was the elimination of parole and good time. You know, all you had was good time. And so, people were staying in.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right.

DAVID SIMON: And you’re absolutely right: They come back out completely tarred. They can’t vote. They can’t participate in their community. They’ve lost track of families. Families have been destroyed. Communities have been upended. And if it was this draconian and it worked, then maybe we could have a discussion that said, “What we’re doing is working.”

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The trade-off’s more worth it.

DAVID SIMON: Yeah, “It’s terrible, and we’re losing a lot of humanity, but, hey, it’s working.” But it doesn’t work.

AMY GOODMAN: David Simon at the White House with President Obama. How did that meeting come about?

DAVID SIMON: It was a shock to me. I had agreed, almost sort of reluctantly, to participate in a bipartisan seminar on reducing federal—I guess all prison population by 50 percent, that had been sponsored not only by some Democratic factions, but by Newt Gingrich, by the Koch Industries people. I mean, it had—it has the chance, actually, in this next 18 months of getting some traction on Capitol Hill, simply because every side realizes for different reasons that this level of incarceration is insane, that we can’t sustain it. You know, the conservatives are looking at it because the cost, this much prison construction. You know, we’ve been led so astray by the privatization of the prisons and the prison-industrial complex and by the drug war that even some conservatives are getting off the train now. And they’re willing to give the Obama administration the victory because it’s a lame-duck—you know, it won’t extend to the next admin—you know, they’re willing to let it happen now. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think Obama is doing things that he wasn’t willing to do before because of legacy?

DAVID SIMON: I don’t—yeah, I don’t think you mess with the drug war until you’re in the last—in the last term, and I don’t think you do it until after the midterms. And I think now you’re seeing—you know, this is a loss leader in terms of political capital. You know, nobody wants to be portrayed as being soft on crime. So I think now is the time to do it. Now is the window. So they asked me to do this. And once I agreed, all of a sudden—I think the president was going to send some remarks, some videotaped remarks, to this event that I was going at. Instead, I was invited to the White House to have this 15-minute discussion with him. And, you know, I wore a tie. I wore a sport—

AMY GOODMAN: I noticed.

DAVID SIMON: I wore a suit for the first time in—you know, I mean, yeah, like the next time, I might be being buried the next time you see me in a suit. But I did everything I could, because, you know, listen, I was happy to be a microphone stand for this, which I—you know, if I have an opinion about anything, after all these years of reporting and storytelling and narrative, the drug war has to end, just has to end.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to The Wire to the main theme in The Wire, which is that relationship between the police and, I mean, especially looking at Freddie Gray today, between the police and the guys—the kids, often—on the corner.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: [played by Benjamin Busch] Hands on the wall, [bleep]

KID ON THE CORNER 1: We ain’t done nothing!

KID ON THE CORNER 2: Seriously. I was just sitting in my chair reading a magazine, is all.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: And watching your crew work a ground stash, you mean? What the [bleep]? Y’all still taking a charge for this, you know that? You’re a truant.

KID ON THE CORNER 1: Today’s Saturday.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: Try Wednesday.

KID ON THE CORNER 2: Why you don’t page truancy? Why y’all locking me up? Hey, Colicio.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: Officer Colicchio, [bleep].

SGT. ELLIS CARVER: [played by Seth Gilliam] We need to block every lane here?

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: Hey, shut it down. It’s a police operation here.

SGT. ELLIS CARVER: Just get back to your post. Let’s back these vehicles up.

DRIVER: Excuse me, officer.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: I’m not telling you again.

SGT. ELLIS CARVER: Tony, calm down.

DRIVER: Officer, if you could just move your car forward just a little bit, I’m gonna get right down the road.

OFFICER ANTHONY COLICCHIO: Who do you think we are? We’re the police!

AMY GOODMAN: “We’re the police.” In that scene from The Wire, the officer throws one of the young men into the back of a police van, a pretty chilling scene given what’s transpired in Baltimore with the death of Freddie Gray. But this was a regular practice during the years of zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore between '99 and 2007, when Martin O'Malley—that’s right, the presidential candidate—was mayor. In 2005 alone, the police department made more than 100,000 arrests in a city of just 640,000 people. How did zero tolerance affect the city, and what are your views of Martin O’Malley running for president?

DAVID SIMON: Poor Marty. Well, the first thing is, you know, the drug war as a whole, when you fight a war, you need an enemy. If you’re going to go on a war footing, then you have an enemy. And that’s what the drug war did. It basically took a—you know, there were always fundamental problems of policing in the inner city between the Baltimore department and communities, but there was at least some basic code of logic as to who went in the back of a police van. The drug war slowly eroded that, even before Marty became mayor.

And then, Marty’s first year as mayor, I was impressed his first year. His first year, he had a very good police commissioner named Eddie Norris, who was very good at locking the right people up. And locking the right people up, taking out the right trash, that’s what a good police department does. And Jill Leovy—I don’t know if you know Jill Leovy’s book out of L.A. that came out last year, Ghettoside, but she makes a very powerful argument that, in some ways, the inner city is both under-policed and over-policed. It’s over-policed on all the stuff that is—it is much like that, that is basically harassment and sort of a beleaguered community that is being sort of affronted on all sides over small stuff that is related to sort of clearing corners in the drug war. And when it comes to, you know, again, Black Lives Matter, in the most fundamental sense, in terms of the rate of homicide and the rate of violence, those crimes don’t get solved, they don’t get attended to. The clearance rates for murder in places like Compton or West Baltimore are extraordinarily low. They’re in the thirties. Whereas in the rest of America they’d be in the sixties or seventies. So they don’t get the policing they need; they get the policing they don’t need.

And with Marty, he came in. That first year was very admirable. And then Norris left, for reasons, you know, that are complicated. But it was almost as if he couldn’t get the reductions in the murder rate that he had promised as a candidate, and the next three or four years were: “Let’s just throw everybody in the back of a van.” And if you think I’m exaggerating, all you have to do is read the ACLU’s suit that the city eventually settled, because it didn’t matter who you were. It didn’t matter if you were somebody sitting on your own stoop or a schoolteacher or somebody coming home from work. If you looked at a cop the wrong way in Baltimore in about those three central years when Marty was trying to become governor, you went in the back of a police van, you were taken down to the city jail, you know, held overnight. They were just trying to clear the corners, because they had lost the framework for actual police work. They didn’t know how to actually solve crimes anymore, but they did know how to fill the wagons. You would go downtown to the city jail, and they’d ask you to sign a form saying “I won’t sue.” If I don’t sue—”Oh, we’ll let you go now if you sign the form. But if you don’t sign the form, we’re keeping you for longer, until you see a court commissioner.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, your sense of him running for president? We have five seconds.

DAVID SIMON: Well, listen, he’s done some things I admire—gay rights and ending the death penalty. But, you know, the notion that he reduced crime by doing that is just a lie.

AMY GOODMAN: David Simon, I want to thank you for spending this time, journalist, television writer, best known for creating the HBO series The Wire and Treme. Now, his latest project, Show Me a Hero on HBO.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.