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Crime writer recounts life on the streets

5:01 p.m., March 4, 2004--When former Baltimore Sun police reporter David Simon requested that the Baltimore Police Department allow him to spend a year with one of its homicide units, most people thought it would never happen.

To his delight and to the dismay of many within the unit, Simon did get the green light, and the result was “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” which won an Edgar Award and became the inspiration for the acclaimed television series, “Homicide: Life on the Streets.”

Simon described this experience as well as the writing of his second book, “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” during a March 1 talk and book signing in the Perkins Student Center.

“I made the proposal to be allowed into the homicide unit to cover it for the paper,” Simon said. “The number-two guy in the Baltimore Police Department was against it, and so was the captain in charge of homicide, but the commissioner, the late Edward J. Tilghman, approved it, and that was that.”

The agreement that allowed him to become part of the unit was a gutsy move on the part of the commissioner, who died by the time Simon came on board in December 1988 as a police intern, he said.

By the time his turn with the homicide unit was completed, Simon had become a familiar and accepted presence in settings such as hospital rooms, autopsies, crime scenes and interrogations.

“Although there were some detectives who were generally irritating, I really enjoyed the people I was with,” Simon said. “Some members of the homicide unit may have been ugly, but they were not venal. The trick in writing a book like this is not to leave out the bad parts.”

The idea for the 630-page book evolved from a single column Simon wrote for The Sun, describing his experiences as a police reporter with a couple of members of the homicide unit during an overnight shift on Christmas Eve.

“There was a stabbing and a couple of other incidents,” Simon said. “There also was something comic about the fact that this was supposed to be the season of goodwill toward men, yet the stabbings and the violence were still going on.”

One of the most difficult aspects of being a crime reporter, Simon said, is talking to family members of murder victims. Still, despite the emotionally charged nature of such a situations, Simon said that most of the persons he contacted were cooperative and were glad in some way that another human being took the time to talk with them.

“A lot of people valued that interchange,” Simon said. “It mattered to them that a portion of society cared about what happened to them.”

Crime writer David Simon (right) signs copies of his books following his talk at UD.
In 1988, the year Simon spent with the squad, there were 234 murders recorded in Baltimore. During the two years he spent writing the book, another 567 murders occurred.

For his next book, “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” Simon teamed up with retired police officer turned Baltimore public school teacher Edward Burns. Together, they chronicled the daily lives of individuals in the city’s Franklin Square Neighborhood—a place Simon said may have contained up to 120 open-air drug dealers.

Divided into a section for each season of the year, the 543-page book details the lives of persons with names like Fat Curt, Mr. Blue and Gee Money, trying to survive in an area where shootings and round-the-clock drug deals are a way of life.

Simon said that he has become a bit more radicalized by the things he has covered and that ”The Corner” is a subtle argument against the drug war.

“What I advocate is trying to reduce the harm caused by the drug wars. There is as much harm that occurs in fighting drugs as in the drugs themselves,” Simon said. “I would like to see all drug wars end. All those untold billions—I would like to see that money go into drug treatment and job training.”

While it took some time to win the trust of the people in the neighborhood, Simon said that he enjoyed being with them and that he still gets an occasional phone call from some of them.

When asked by a member of the audience if he thought the spotlight turned on the individuals in the book may have convinced some of them to seek help for their addictions, Simon said he didn’t think that was the case.

“People get clean by what is inside them. They have to hit bottom,” Simon said. “It is an epic thing when someone does make the decision to quit their addiction. It is really a hero’s walk that they are on.”

Simon also said that tailoring a book to achieve a certain end usually results in a work that is less convincing than just recording things as they happen and letting the reader make the final judgment.

“What I try to do is just tell the story as best I can,” Simon said. “It’s rewarding when people tell me that they read my book and say ‘This is it; this is the way it is.’”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Kevin Quinlan

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