David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart. Has reality caught up to the “Murder Police”?
Intelligencer, January 12, 2022: David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart. Has reality caught up to the “Murder Police”?
“Since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Official misconduct was present in 22 of the cases. ‘The history of BPD officers and detectives withholding exculpatory evidence from the accused, coercing and threatening witnesses, fabricating evidence, and intentionally failing to conduct meaningful investigations is decades long,’ wrote the attorneys for Clarence Shipley, a Baltimore man who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit before he was exonerated in 2018. ‘BPD’s misconduct in [Shipley’s] case,’ they said, is ‘yet another chapter in the long story of BPD’s pattern and practice of wrongdoing during homicide investigations.’
“More than a dozen such cases can be traced directly to misconduct by the Baltimore Police Department in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the detectives accused of being bad actors — Pellegrini, Requer, Fahlteich, Donald Kincaid, Gary Dunnigan, Terrence McLarney, Jay Landsman, and several others — were chronicled in Simon’s book Homicide. Some of them, like Pellegrini, Landsman, and Requer, inspired beloved television characters on Homicide: Life on the Street or, later, The Wire.”
Additional reading:
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon on bookshop.org
Los Angeles Review of Books, August 18, 2014: Building a Better Panopticon: “The Wire” as Melodrama
On The Wire by Linda Williams on bookshop.org
