David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

One of the six cases-the murder of Brenda Thompson, stabbed to death in the back of a Dodge in early January-runs into a conflicting priority: Latonya Wallace. Harry Edgerton is the primary detective in the Thompson murder, the secondary in the slaying of the little girl. As a result, the Thompson case is farmed out to Bertina Silver.

Edgerton and his sergeant, Roger Nolan, argue briefly with both D’Addario and the captain against the change, maintaining that it serves no purpose to change the primary detective in the middle of an investigation for the sake of creating some immediate activity. Edgerton knows the case file and the players, and most important, he has spent hours creating a working relationship with his best suspect, a young street dealer who sold for Brenda Thompson and owed her money. The kid has already been willing to subject himself to a couple of long interrogations. Edgerton argues that the Thompson murder is already two months old, and anything the special detail may do now can just as easily be done two or three or four weeks down the road, after the Latonya Wallace case has resolved itself.

Edgerton has on his side the prevailing wisdom and tradition of the homicide unit, both of which argue that no one can know a murder as well as the detective who handles the scene and its aftermath. The bosses, however, are adamant. A police department is a reactive beast, and with the newspapers and television both crowing about the possibility of multiple murders in the Northwest, tradition and wisdom are both being sold off at basement prices. The Thompson case goes to Bert Silver.

In happier times, Edgerton might have appealed personally to D’Addario, but now that the lieutenant has problems of his own, that appeal would be pointless. Latonya Wallace, the subterranean clearance rate, the Northwest murders-any and all are reason enough for D’Addario to feel vulnerable. Already there has been one meeting with the colonel and Deputy Mullen on the Latonya Wallace detail, an hour-long summary in which Jay Landsman outlined the efforts undertaken by the detectives and then fielded questions until the bosses seemed mollified. The meeting was a seamless piece of departmental politics, but D’Addario has to know that unless the solve rate rises, Landsman’s performance is no more than a temporary reprieve.

If D’Addario had stayed tight with the captain, the threat wouldn’t be so severe. Lately, however, a conflict that had been percolating for months has suddenly come to full boil. Simply put, the captain doesn’t want D’Addario as one of his shift lieutenants; to D’Addario, the decision to bypass him on the Monroe Street probe said as much. And now, with his solve rate so low, the captain has leverage with which he can press the point-unless D’Addario can, like a cat with a canary locked in its jaw, go to the colonel with a fresh victory in one of the major cases, or at least a hint that the solve rate is turning around. It matters not at all that D’Addario has done the job for eight years; the consciousness of the command staff rarely strays beyond the latest red ball and as a result, the departmental hierarchy often expresses itself in that timeless query of practical politics: What have you done for me lately?

If the rate is good, if the red balls fall, it doesn’t matter how D’Addario runs his shift. You say your detectives and sergeants are told to follow their own judgment on cases? Obviously, a fine example of a leader emphasizing confidence and responsibility. You say you leave it to the sergeants to train and discipline their men? Obviously, a man who knows the value of delegated responsibility. You say your overtime is running 90 percent over budget? That’s fine, you’ve got to break some eggs for that omelette. Court time, too? Well, that just proves that more of these murders are going to trial. But let the rate slip and the lieutenant’s image is suddenly transformed into that of a man incapable of directing and disciplining his men, a commander who leaves too much in the hands of his subordinates, a manager who can’t control his budget.

On the midnight shift just before the colonel’s brief oratory, five or six detectives were adrift in the admin office, floating on a sea of paperwork from the fresh spate of open murders. Eddie Brown, James, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Nolan-a fair cross section, a gathering of veterans who had all seen both good times and bad in the homicide unit. Inevitably, the talk turned to whether this year would really turn out any worse. Some argued that it always evened out, that for every stretch of stone whodunits there was a supply of dunkers waiting to take up the slack. Others pointed out that the rate would be higher if the shift had bothered to save a few December clearances to pump up the current year’s stats. But for all of their talk, none of the detectives could remember a rate as low as 36 percent.

“And I’ll tell you something,” said Fahlteich, “I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

“Oh, it’s going to get a helluva lot worse,” Nolan agreed. “We’ve been coasting around here for a long time and now it’s catching up to us.”

Suddenly no one in the room was typing or collating anymore as voices competed with one another in a recitation of longstanding grievances. They complained about the equipment, about cars without radios and about a major urban department that still doesn’t provide a polygraph examiner suitable for criminal investigations, requiring detectives to use the state police facilities. They complained about the cutbacks in overtime, about the department’s reluctance to pay for pretrial preparation so that good cases wouldn’t come unglued in the months between arrest and trial. They complained about the lack of money to pay informants and, consequently, the lack of informants. They complained about the inability of the trace and ballistics labs to keep up with the violence, about how the state’s attorney’s office no longer charged anyone with perjury when they lied to a grand jury, about how too many prosecutors allowed witnesses to back up on their grand jury testimony. They complained about the growing number of drug-related murders, about how the days of the domestic dunker and 90-plus clearance rates were long gone. They complained that the phone didn’t ring the way it used to after a murder, that fewer people were willing to drop a dime and risk becoming a witness to an act of violence.

As a bitch-and-moan session, it was entirely satisfying. After a good forty minutes, the group was still thumping on dead horseflesh: “Look at Washington,” said Brown. “That ain’t but thirty miles away from us.”

For a police detective, a detail with the District of Columbia’s homicide unit had suddenly become synonymous with being assigned to hell itself. Washington was well on the way to becoming the U.S. murder capital in 1988; only two years earlier, the capital and Baltimore had posted similar rates and fought for whatever distinction comes with being the nation’s tenth deadliest city. Now, in the wake of a cocaine epidemic and a series of Jamaican drug wars in the capital’s Northeast and Southeast quadrants, the District’s police department was contending with an incidence of homicide double that of Baltimore. As a result, Washington’s homicide squad-once one of the best-trained investigative units in the nation-was now posting a clearance rate in the low 40s. Awash in a deluge of violence, there was no time for follow-up investigation, no time for pretrial preparation, no time for anything but picking up bodies. From what the Baltimore detectives gathered in passing encounters, morale in the D.C. unit was nonexistent.

“The same thing’s going to happen here and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it,” said Brown. “Wait until we start seeing some of that crack up here. We already got the Jamaican problem up in the Northwest, but does anyone give a damn about that? Hell, no. This town’s gonna break wide open and this department isn’t even gonna know what hit it.”