TheAgitator.com
My Interview With Ed Burns
Friday, March 7th, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Ed Burns, the co-creator of HBO’s The Wire. We covered the show, the drug war, criminal justice, police work, public education, and politics, as well as the upcoming HBO miniseries, Generation Kill.
The interview is now up at reason.
I know this is off topic, but… no reaction to Don Armentano’s dismissal from Cato? We’re all wondering what you think.
wonderful interview- thanks
Burns has to be one of the dumbest people I’ve ever heard.
reason: What do you make of the “Stop Snitchin’” movement, the street campaign that discourages people from cooperating with police, which seems to have started in Baltimore?
Burns: Well, again, it’s something that’s incidental. It’s a symptom. If the police were connected, if the police were actively involved with the people in the neighborhood, the amount of information they would be getting would be so great….”
Really? Ed? Agipotater, isn’t the whole idea of your site to get the police out of our lives? Burns wants them more actively involved, sounds like liberal speak.
Ah, Pat.
Did you even read the rest of the interview?
It’s not about the police becoming a bigger part of your life. It’s about making them a trusted part of the neighborhoods they’re patrolling, instead of this “us versus them” mentality we have today. It’s about policing for real crimes, and working to make neighborhoods safer, not just racking up arrest statistics.
I think the “snitches” thing is also being misunderstood, here. Snitches benefit form talking. It is like getting paid for exposing someone, bigger. Prostitution of ones self, is what it is. You buy your way out of the lock-up with information that will hurt someone else! Some people cooperate with the cops, because they feel a legal, law abiding, obligation. And, they are not getting any benefit, unless they can get rid of the problem! In fact, if they are found out, they likely have put themselves, and their families, in danger. I find it interesting that many more snitches are not reported murdered, after exposing the wrong person to get out of a wrap. But a snitch is a whore. The person, telling the police that they do not like the house, that looks like the grand central station of drugs, in their neighborhood, is not a snitch. They are a concerned citizen. Albeit, very misled.
Too bad they are concerned for all of the wrong reasons, fed to them by this crazy idea that the drug war is a good thing! These citizens are hurting people because they don’t like them and the “pestilence” they bring. Too bad they don’t see the hypocrisy by comparing that to alcohol and cigarette deaths in our country!!
> It’s not about the police becoming a bigger part of your life. It’s
> about making them a trusted part of the neighborhoods they’re
> patrolling, instead of this “us versus them” mentality we have
> today. It’s about policing for real crimes, and working to make
> neighborhoods safer, not just racking up arrest statistics.
So long as part of the *job-description* of being a police officer is to arrest people for bullshit “consensual crimes” (as opposed to those “real crimes”), this is flat-out IMPOSSIBLE. Not, mind you, slight impossible or half impossible or even mostly but not necessarily totally impossible — It’s IMPOSSIBLE.
When police are required to be unethical human-beings, then unethical human-beings will come to dominate police forces. No mystery there.
I think the no snitch stuff is aimed towards people who see crime in the neighborhood and want to report it. Not the confidential informants who are usually the scumbags bitching about not snitching.
There was a picture in our local paper of 2 little kids that were beat and starved by drug addicted parents, (pot, meth, coke). The drug war is not working, but legalization would be rough. Sometimes in life even the smartest people can’t fix our hardest problems.
I’m sorry Agipotater, but Burns just sounds windy, not really saying anything of substance. I know you like that show and maybe it’s a good show but that doesn’t make the guy able to solve poverty in the “inner cities”, and all the blah blah blah stuff he was spouting.
I haven’t read James Wilson’s Atlantic Monthly article since college, but I thought part of “the old broken windows theory” WAS community policing.