Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is
David Simon's nonfiction account of a year spent as
a "police intern" attached to Lieutenant Gary "Dee" D'Addario's shift in the
homicide unit of the Baltimore Police Department.
Simon, a staff reporter with The Baltimore
Sun, took a leave of absence from January 1,
1988 until December 31st of the
same year to accompany fifteen detectives and three
sergeants day and night, wherever their casework
took them: crime scene, administrative
work, interrogations, courtrooms,
autopsies, interviews, hospital
emergency rooms, warrant searches. The rules of his
internship were simple: do not engage in anything even
remotely resembling police work; do not get in the
way of any investigation, obey the department's code
of conduct; publish nothing about departmental
business in The Sun during his period of
internship; accept any restrictions on his access
deemed necessary by the department superiors; do not
quote any police personnel who do not wish to be
quoted. Otherwise, he was free to follow the detectives
anywhere and view everything.
Understandably, this arrangement got off to a rocky
start: a straw poll of homicide personnel, taken before
Simon arrived, tallied three in favor and thirty-three
opposed to his presence. Despite this formidable
handicap, he was eventually able to ingratiate
himself with the detectives on his shift to the point
where "allowing a reporter to gawk at the chaos of
criminal investigation was entirely natural."
Having gained their trust, he obtained an unprecedented
in-the-trenches view of day-to-day
police work in Baltimore, homicide investigation,
and ultimately the detectives themselves.
Returning to The Sun after completing his
internship, Simon attempted to write columns based on
his experiences of the past year, but quickly became
frustrated with trying to tell the story from what he
labelled "pure journalistic
perspective"
, and decided "that this story
would be best told if the narrator, rather than
adopting the communal voice of the newspaper,
adopted the communal voice of the city homicide
detective."
Feeling unable to accomplish this
within the context of a daily newspaper, he wrote
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets over the
next two years, which ended up clocking in at over six
hundred pages. The book was published by Random House
in 1991, and won the Edgar Award for Best
Fact-Based Crime writing in 1992. Subsequently, it
was utilized as the source material for the critically acclaimed TV series, Homicide:
Life on the Street.
Baltimore recorded 234 murders during 1988, one of
the highest rates in the nation at the time, and the
cases portrayed within run the gamut, from top priority
"red ball" cases like the assault and murder of an
eleven-year old girl named Latonya Wallace, to the
most commonplace drug slaying imaginable. They range
from the simplest "dunkers", where the clues fall
right into your lap and the murderer walks up to the
police to promptly confess (sometimes literally), to
the coldest "stone whodunit", where you've got a
body, but nothing else:
"... because both men know that Baltimore's thirteenth
homicide of 1988, handed to them on the second leg of a
midnight shift at the corner of Gold and Etting, is
an exceptionally weak sister: a drug killing with
no known witnesses, no specific motive and no
suspects. Perhaps the only person in Baltimore who
might have managed some real interest in the case is
at this moment being shoveled onto a body litter.
Rudy Newsome's brother will make the identification
later that morning outside a freezer door across from
the autopsy room, but after that the boy's family
will offer little else. The morning newspaper will
print not a line about the killing. The
neighborhood, or whatever is left around Gold and
Etting that resembles a neighborhood, will move on.
"West Baltimore, home of the misdemeanor homicide."
Against this backdrop of fallen bodies, Simon provides
a gritty, insider's view of the some of the core issues
faced by Baltimore police officers: eyewitnesses,
Miranda rights, the neighborhoods, violence against
police officers, surveying a crime scene, interrogation
and interview techniques, evidence, police
brutality, low pay, forensic techniques, racism,
the harsh realities of the criminal justice system,
motive, investigating other police officers,
intuition, and underlying it all, the brutal
no-quarter-given politics of civil service,
especially within the police department. He creates a
vibrant and realistic portrait of the detectives he
travelled with, laying out their varied and sometimes
checkered histories, problems, personalities,
techniques, motivations, and their consistently dark senses of humor. Most interestingly, the
story is told exclusively from the perspective of the
homicide detectives, as Simon wanted it to be. His
presence is felt in the prose and the organization of
the narrative, in the way that all of the sprawling
topics are grafted into appropriate places in the
timeline, but the voices speaking are those of the
detectives: their own stories in their own words.
It is the holistic combination of the cases, the
environment, and the men, bound together by Simon's
talented delivery, which make the book so amazing and
crucial. This is possibly the closest the written word
can bring you to understanding modern day urban
policing: the overwhelming insanity and frustration of
it all, and the driving motivation that keeps a small
group of men coming back to take up the torch, day
after day, year after year.
"Because in a police department of about three thousand
sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators
entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary
of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for
the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your
paycheck may come from fiscal services, but, goddamnit,
after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself
that you work for the Lord himself. If you are
not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a
year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft
or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If
you are good enough, you will never do anything else as
a cop that matters this much."