It’s interesting to read this book so soon after The New Jim Crow. They’re products of a different era, but they have some surprising parallels.
This is the book that made David Simon, and while it’s fun to hunt easter eggs and find the seeds of his work in this, it’s an incredible achievement on its own. The book was published at a pivotal time — halfway through George Bush’s only term after 8 years of Reagan, only weeks after Rodney King’s beating by police. This was near the peak of pop culture’s obsession with good guy cops.
He does amazing work here, especially considering did most of the work before his 30th birthday. The characters and stories leap off the page. More impressively, he goes on long digressions, almost philosophical deep-dives into different parts of the job. Several chapters have lengthy sections about one specific aspect of policing — crime scene evaluation and management, interrogation, autopsies, etc.. These sections are every bit as engrossing as the actual police work, and they’re where the similarities to Michelle Alexander’s book are clearest. Chapter 4 contains a digression about interrogation that describes outright how the police techniques have evolved in the context of civil-rights progress. He writes:
…[a supervisor] once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception:
Uncooperative.
Too cooperative.
Talks too much.
Talks too little.
Gets his story perfectly straight.
Fucks his story up.
Blinks too much, avoids eye contact.
Doesn’t blink. Stares.
This was (and perhaps shouldn’t have been) surprising in its’ similarity to this from Alexander (p91):
The [drug-courier] profile can include traveling with luggage, traveling without luggage, driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs repairs, driving with out-of-state license plates, driving a rental car, driving with “mismatched occupants,” acting too calm, acting too nervous, dressing casually, wearing expensive clothing or jewelry, being one of the first to deplane, being one of the last to deplane, deplaning in the middle, paying for a ticket in cash, using large-denomination currency, using small denomination currency, traveling alone, traveling with a companion, and so on. Even striving to obey the law fits the profile!
Simon isn’t necessarily a fan of the police, and he is full of contempt for criminals. In Richard Price’s forward of my edition, he writes about his mantra regarding representation of police:
As a chronicler I will honor you with the faithful reporting of what I see and hear while a guest in the house of your life. As for how you come off, you dig your own grave or build your own monument by being who you are, so good luck and thanks for your time.
But there’s clear bias here — Simon spent a year with these men, he knows them and likes them, and by the end of the book I did too. You see the trauma and toll that the work takes on the police, their mental and physical health, their relationships with their loved ones. You also see the brutal misogyny, casual and overt racism, toxic masculinity and boys’ club atmosphere that persists in varying degrees today.
They didn’t spare him either. From the ‘Post mortem’ section of the book:
…if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating fellatio, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.
Simon doesn’t call it out — he’s a reporter, so he reports. While this often toes the line of implicit endorsement, it doesn’t diminish the quality of this book at all.
Like The Wire, Homicide has as much to say about police as it does about the systems that affect them (courts, statistical analyses, budgets). It’s a classic book, worthy of all the praise, and stands up as a perfect specimen of American law enforcement culture of that era.
Lastly, if you need another reason to read this, the clip below is one of many incredible moments that made it into The Wire: