The Wire (Weeks 1-7)

01/15/25

• Topics covered throughout the show: 

  • War on Drugs (we’re on the tail end of the war on drugs which is super expensive)

  • Politics of crime and punishment

  • S2: labor politics and politics of sector career advancement

  • S3: local elections, housing politics, politics of policing

  • S4: local politics and urban education (how societal issues enter the school system)

  • S5: the press

• Social science: study of social and political world using the scientific method (ish)

  • Develop question (how did DeAngelo end up in this situation, what are the structures that allow for lower levels of the organization to feel constrain from higher ups) 

  • Develop theory and model (thesis basically abt how the world works)

  • Identifying implications (hypothesis) > if the world looks like x, i argue that …

  • Observe evidence and evaluate hypothesis

  • Evaluate theory

• Context (2002):

  • Show created by former Baltimore reporter with homicide detective

  • Early 2000s = last decade of war on drugs (ended arnd 2009)

    • 1971 started, launched by Nixon (“drug addiction is public enemy number one”) > tools included eradication and incarceration

    • Researchers linked war on drugs to mass incarceration

    • More arrests for possession rather than sales throughout war on drugs

      • These arrests also have racial disparities (arrests of white people for drugs is fairly stable throughout while the arrests of black people for drugs shows a steep increase throughout)

  • Premiered less than a year after 9/11 (federal gov isn’t funding war on drugs–funding war on terror instead) < American public also supports this change in funding (^^ Homeland defense)

    • This fear of terror is especially prominent in coastal cities like Baltimore

  • Transitional period for technology = percentage of adults who use internet increases (who is using the internet and why doesn’t the Baltimore police department have access to it) (better funded PDs have better tech)

01/22/25

• Criminal justice institutions: police, judge, prosecutors

  • Informational differences between people working on the street and in office

• Themes

  • Chain of command and organizational rules and norms (McNulty violates this)

  • Parallels between the Barksdale organization 

  • Police face incentives to do less “good” work and more easy work

• Criminal Process

  • Enter the system = arrested and brought for questioning

  • Prosecution and pretrial services = charge, initial appearance, preliminary hearings

  • Adjudication = arraignment, plea, or trial (90 something % of cases in US dont go to trial)

  • Sentencing and sanctions

  • Corrections

• Residential segregation = when they drive to his soccer game everything looks physically different (much nicer)

• Massey and Denton, American Apartheid

  • Observation: observed the “urban underclass” > a lot of poverty and other poor outcomes among black ppl in the US particularly those who live in intercities (intercity poverty)

    • What has led to this persistent race-based poverty among Black people in the US?

  • Theorized that deliberate residential segregation has led to persistent poverty among black people in the US

    • Individual actions, institutional practices and government policies lead to an increase in residential segregation

    • As segregation increases so does poverty

  • White flight from cities as urban areas became filled with black people – white ppl looked for ways to promote racial homogeneity

  • Restrictive covenants = a provision in real property transaction that limits or restricts actions of person being granted property

    • In the deed, it says you’re agreeing to never do X or always do Y 

    • Racial restrictive covenants 

  • Further techniques: 

    • Blockbusting (real estate agents convince white property owners to sell property at low prices to get out of “bad” neighborhoods and then sell these properties to black ppl at a much higher price > creates more racial segregation)

    • Steering = white and black clients sent to diff neighborhoods when buying

    • Redlining = gov sponsored organization (home owners loan corporation) as part of New Deal to refinance home mortgages. Categories riskiness of lending to households based on where it was located (color-coded)

      • This process is a key driver of racial residential segregation and wealth inequality 

    • Theil Index for Racial Segregation 

      • Compares racial composition of neighborhoods w racial composition of the larger region

      • If neighborhoods have similar racial composition they have a low Theil index (TAIL index)

      • And if neighborhoods have diff racial comp they get high Theil index

  • Segregation leads to poverty

01/27/25

• Political Power and the Chain of Command

  • Police Commissioner & Election-retained Judges (Phelan)

  • Deputy Ops Commissioner (Burrell)

  • Majors (Rawls)

  • Detectives and Officers (The Detail)

War on Drugs, domestic timeline

• 1960s = huge increase in recreational drug use

  • 1969 = Nixon calls drug abuse a “national threat” and calls for a national anti-drug policy

    • Officially declares war on drugs in 71, Drugs are public enemy number 1

• Nixon creates DEA (in 73) and its role is to coordinate drug efforts across all federal agencies (FBI, CBP, etc.)

  • When DEA first created, it was small and underfunded but by 2017, the agency had 5k agents and budget of over 2 mil

• In 80s cocaine emerged and became popular (concern about crack epidemic)

  • Nancy Reagan launches the Just Say No campaign (to using or exploring drugs)

  • Campaign led to public concern about drugs (people start freaking out even more)

    • Not sure if drug campaigns were successful in reducing usage

• Reagan signs anti-drug abuse act of 1986 where we get an act that appropriates a ton of money towards ending drug abuse and started a sentencing disparity

• HW Bush creates ONDCP in 89 and there’s a focus on drug abuse as being socially unacceptable

  • With all this infrastructure, the fed gov established grants for local law enforcement to fight the drug war on their own terms (hire more officers, new equipment, etc. but HAD to be for drugs)

• In 1995 US sentencing commission acknowledges racial disparities in sentencing (we should reduce the crack disparity and Congress overrides this)

  • Were rigid until 2015 ish until these sentencing guidelines became more flexible

• Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 = reduced crack disparity, eliminated 5 year mandatory minimum for the simple possession of crack

Success of War on Drugs

• Success definition = fewer drug sales, less drug use, less drug-related crime

• Costs =  incarceration increases (disproportionately by race), police efforts, personnel time, increased prison population

  • Do benefits outweigh the costs

    • War on Drugs perpetuates historical trajectory that sustains racial inequality in the US and ^^ cost of incarceration

Evidence for Success of War on Drugs

• Increasing incarceration of individuals for drugs means that these people aren’t on the streets selling drugs and producing consequences of drug sales and drug use

• Cost of drugs would have to go up since there’s less demand (due to incarceration ^^)

  • Most crimes tried in state court system, so there’s a high volume (high increase) of people committed to prisons for drug use

  • Adult drug arrests show a slight increase in the number of drug-related arrests

    • We’re sentencing these people a lot more harshly

Conclusion

• WoD led to an increase in individuals w drug convictions in the prison population (Could be mark of success if we think that putting more people who commit drug related crimes will get these people off the streets and prevent them from selling drugs AND will make trade more costly and lead to its subsequent decline)

  • Even though the rising incarceration is linked to war on drugs, Drugs only account for 16% of the prison population (WoD couldn’t have led to mass incarceration)

• Incarceration increased cocaine prices 5-15%

  • BUT heroin prices plummeted

  • So did the prices of cocaine

• Rate of violent offence for drug convicts vs other crimes were similar”

Section I Activity:

• Question: How does the quality of drugs sold affect Barksdale organization sales?

  • Quality = doses and how diluted a drug is

  • Organization sales = measured by organization financial income 

• Criteria evaluating by: socioeconomic (and drug addiction) lens

• Implications/ hypothesis: the worse the drug is, the more people will buy and the more the Barksdale organization will profit (since their sales increase)

  • Metrics: the number of sales, recurring customers, breaking down what’s in the drug, how it affects consumers physiologically, cost of drug production

01/29/28

• Civil Asset Forfeiture = officers can take money they seize (which can then go into the PD’s budget)

• Defense of war on drugs = could have been worse without the war on drugs

  • Brings up the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference (you can never observe the counterfactual > we observe one state of the world but we can’t know what could have been in some alternate state)

    • Like if you’re canvassing to someone and then they vote Democratic, we can’t know if that same person would have voted Democratic if we hadn’t canvassed

• Conditions for Causality: How can we know if X causes Y

1. Temporal precedence: X MUST come before Y

2. X and Y must covary (must be correlated and happening simultaneously)

3. No alternative explanations for this covariation you see between X and Y

• Solution to this problem is randomized experiments

  • Random assignment = if we truly use randomness to assign subjects to control or treatment we’re controlling for any other alternative explanations for the effect we measure afterwards

    • Control group becomes counterfactual to the treatment group

  • Experimental control

02/05/25

Race and Policing

• Racial disparities in policing are well-documented and persistent (traffic stops, arrest disparities, use of force

• Research questions: 

  • What are the causes of racial disparities and over-policing? (Beckett)

  • What are the consequences of racial disparities in policing? (Prowse)

  • How do (seemingly) unrelated policy decisions affect racial disparities? (Beckett, Eckhouse)

• Administrative data = data collected and maintained by federal, state, and local gov

  • Only reflects encounters and interactions the gov records

  • Interactions where officers talk to people outside of arrests are undocumented (unlikely to know how often these interactions occur, the outcomes of interaction, and what role race plays in these interactions)

    • Also couldn’t learn too much about the drug economy in a city just from police data (organization interaction, innerworkings, how they target potential buyers)

• Ethnographic data and data from participant observation > able to learn about who was selling drugs, buying drugs, how active the drug economy was

  • In order to be classified as data, the researcher has to think carefully abt how they are collecting information and how this approach affects analysis

• Distorted Responsiveness > analyzed using response portals (conversations)

  • Police data can’t tell us about daily interactions w police

  • Bottom-up Data = portals

  • Top-Down Data = surveys (who did you vote for, what party do you believe in, how many times have you been stopped by police

• Big question: Are racial disparities evidence of discrimination?

  • Stanford Open Policing Project > addressing lack of national repository of police data which focused on vehicle and pedestrian stops

    • Let’s use this data to see if there are racial disparities in who is stopped, then find data to see that these discrepancies are evidence for discrim.

    • Figures compare outcomes for Black and Latino drivers to White drivers

• Alternative Explanations (Only See What We Can See)

  • Focusing on hit rates as a measure of discrimination is not ideal 

• Veil of Darkness Test = methodology for analyzing police traffic stops to discern whether racially disparate traffic stop behavior is present (VOD uses a natural experiment in daylight over the course of a year)

  • More black drivers stopped before dark

02/10/25

• Union > organization of workers that exists to protect their interests, improve conditions of work, etc.

  • Organization formed by workers who join together and use their strength to have a voice in the workplace > negotiation

Recap:

• McNulty finds a floating body on harbor patrol > they fight over jurisdiction of the body 

  • Thinks it should be a case for city police

• Daniels in charge of evidence room in basement

• Stringer identifies problem w Barksdale drug supplier

  • Avon sends Stringer to ATL

• Decline in work conditions and availability for union port workers

• McNulty proves that 13 deaths were homicide and how they fall under jurisdiction of city PD

Police Unions as Interest Groups

• Interest groups = a group of people who work together to achieve something they’re interested in by putting pressure on the govt

  • Police unions, port unions, church

• Where do we find these interest groups?

  • Local government expenditure (police protection, health and hospitals)

  • Activity of interest groups 

• Collective Bargaining =  the process where working people, through their unions, negotiate contracts w their employers to determine their terms of employment, including pay, benefits, hours, leave, job health, and safety policies

  • Unions = trade unions

Police Unions as Interest Groups: DiSalvo

• Public employee unions

• Complex relation w American labor movement

  • 15-20% of law-enforcement affiliated w AFL-CIO

• Important organizations shaping electoral policies > lobbying events and political contributions (Frank hires lobbyists to effectively influence elected officials choices)

  • Public Costs of Police Unions > how much does collective bargaining effect costs (begins around 1972)

  • Bargaining cities spend 4.3% more on salaries per capita and have 16.5% more spending on health benefits per capita (cities w collective bargaining)

    • Collective bargaining rights lead to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriff’s offices relative to police departments

Trade Unions in the U.S. (Overview)

• Tightening of legislation > electoral effects of “Right-to-Work” legislation

  • Allow workers to opt out of paying fees to a union at workplace, even if those workers benefit from union bargaining and protections

• Trade Unions in US > heterogeneity and history of unions in industrial areas (race plays significant role in dividing workers))

02/12/25

• Principal Agent Problem = how monitoring in bureaucracies creates new problems and changes the incentives of people within the structure

  • Arises when you have a principal who delegates a task to an agent and the agent is working on behalf of the principal

  • Problem that we refer to arises due to an informational asymmetry (the agent has more info about the task than the managing principal, and the principal doesn’t know for sure if the agent will carry out the task in the way that the principal wants/ in a way that aligns w the principal’s incentives)

    • Agent may not always be acting in the principal’s best interest

• Think about this problem in terms of Rawls (principal) and McNulty (agent)

  • McNulty has more information about the crime scene and area than Rawls (doesn’t know the players of the city or which gang runs the trade)

  • Rawls and McNulty also have different incentives (Rawls wants to move through and quickly clear homicides to keep clearance rate up (helps him advance in his career) VS McNulty, who wants to prove he’s a good officer and wants to perform honest, good police work)

• Principal Agent Problem within the Policing Chain of Command v

  • Mayor, Politicians (Clay Davis)

  • Commissioners and Deputies (Burrell)

  • Majors (Rawls)

  • Detectives and Officers (The Detail)

• Other examples of power hierarchies: The Barksdale Organization, Constituent (regular citizen) vs. Elected officials, Customer vs. Mechanic

• What led to US Mass Incarceration according to Pfaff?

  • Most people attribute US Mass incarceration to War on Drugs related convictions and imprisonments

    • But the War had various starting points

    • Federal v state v local policies

    • It all comes down to prosecutorial power

  • Yes drugs are important and the WOD increases prison population for drug related convictions, but even w that increase, ppl w drug offenses are only about 20% of prison population (majority is on account of violent crimes)

  • We have long prison sentences but reducing mandatory minimums is not enough, we have to reduce the prison admissions rate

• Major argument: Local prosecutors are why we see such high levels of incarceration in the US since prosecutors do/ decide …

  • Whether to charge (each time the police arrest someone does not mean they’re going to be charged w anything)

  • What to charge w or how many charges to bring (ex: possession of weapon, attempt to use weapon, etc.)

  • Whether to dismiss

  • Lead the plea agreement process

• Plea Agreements (90% to 98% cases resolved w plea agreement)

  • Usually involves some types of “bargaining” (acquittals are very rare)

    • Charge bargaining > defendant agrees to plead guilty for a lesser amount of charges, to a less serious charge (shorter prison sentence, possibility of probation)

    • Sentence bargaining > judge has discretion and they can change how long a sentence is

    • Fact bargaining > just focus on a particular charge

• About Prosecutors and Organization

  • Head prosecutors are elected in most states (hire assistant prosecutors from here

  • Serve at a county level but have same jurisdiction as state court they’re paired w

  • County budgets fund the prosecutor’s office and jails while state budgets fund prisons and most of state court operations

• Prosecutor Incentives > “Tough on Crime” but now we’re starting to see more “Progressive” and “Reform-Minded” prosecutors 

02/24/25

• Federalism = form of gov that divides power across political unites 

  • Mode of political organization that unites separate states within an overarching political system that still provides a certain degree of sovereignty to the states

• Lots of debates on how to manage power between national and state level (back to the founding fathers where Hamilton argued for more gov power and Jefferson argued for less gov power bc this could lead to government overreach)

  • States rights was used to protect slavery and prevent gov from abolition

• Specialization of Governmental Function in the traditional system (up until 1937) a lot of functions were up to the state while the Federal system only really dealt with tariffs, public land disposal, and currency

  • States assumed most responsibility especially pertaining to everyday lives of people

  • Most power came from founding of U.S. (fed gov a lot more limited)

• The New Deal (period after 1937) = after the Great Depression (^ danger of social instability, militant workers, strikes, inability to find work, unrest) > in response to mass unemployment

  • Think WPA and CPA

  • FDR hired more federal workers and established social safety net (social security act of 1985, fair labor standards act of 1938 (fed regulation of the workplace), and wagner act (voters can vote to form their own representation at work via unions))

    • Driven by initiative of workers themselves’

• Unions were really important for building political representation for workers

• Poverty and misery concentrated in city while labor leaves and unions are in decline

  • New Deal legislation sowed the seeds of its decline in cities like Baltimore = ND encouraged transition from urban to suburban areas (via housing plans, highways, homeowner loans organization) > initiated practice of redlining

    • Active federal government doesn’t always act equitably

      • National economic crisis, oil shocks (^ energy and transportation costs > inflation), intensifying global competition

  • Neoliberalism = emphasizes efficiency of free markets, individual liberties, and necessity of minimal centralized gov intervention

    • Unions like Frank’s would suffer under this ideology

• The Docks = more machinery and automation now, bigger scale now, less solidarity

  • Less labor and the revolution of our supply chain via deregulation, laws like motor carrier, and the box > faster supply chains has made lives convenient but brought down living standards of American workers (enabled firms to have more mobility by moving places where they had cheaper, less organized labor)

    • Industry left Baltimore for cheaper reasons

• New Federalism (containerization) = country’s physical and social infrastructure like roads, edu, masstransit, public parks, police, fire services, and sanitation systems

  • Redistributive responsibilities: transfer of econ resources fro those who have the most to those who have the least (elderly, disabled, unemployed, sick, poor, women-led households)

    • States can set their own eligibility standards for welfare programs and author argues that local and state govs may be efficient in economic development, but at a more local level, these govs are better responding to what people want