Long before I lived in Baltimore, I was a fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, and particularly of Andre Braugher. I've never subscribed to HBO, but had heard that The Wire, also written by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, was even more realistic. A while back I treated us to the DVD set of the series, and watching The Wire has made it hard to take other cop shows seriously. Simon and cowriter Ed Burns, a former Baltimore Detective, portrayed Baltimore's establishment: police, officials, dockworkers, teachers and reporters with all sorts of warts - and just as flawed as the drug and criminal culture. As described by Radley Balko in Reason:

Although both are unreservedly men of the left, Simon and Burns created a show that eviscerated Democratic governance, capturing the futility and spectacular failure of local institutions. The Wire serves as a primer on unintended consequences, public choice theory, and the way politics poisons civil society. Characters showing even a hint of nobility are almost inevitably punished by indifferent, plodding bureaucrats, overly ambitious politicians, or the damaging actions of well-meaning public employees. The results can be heartbreaking, as when broken policies drive a promising circle of middle school students to bleak destinies.

Even though the series ended three years ago, the portrayal of a police department obsessed with good CompStat results still smarts with Police Commissioner Frederick H Bealefeld III, who claims the show was a, "smear on this city that will take decades to overcome."

What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it's a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort - beyond self-serving - to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system.

As reported in the Sun, David Simon responded:

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.  That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.  Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.

In Baltimore's Top Cop Disses The Wire, Jesse Walker of Reason offers some background on  the commish:

I might as well add that I met Bealefeld before he was commissioner, first when he spoke to a neighborhood meeting in South Baltimore and then at another community event. While I didn't always agree with him, he struck me as a no-bullshit sort of guy -- certainly far franker than the other city officials who sometimes showed up at those meetings -- and not a man who was eager to defend the general state of affairs at his department. Now that he's running the place, he's tearing into a show with a similar no-bullshit approach. I'm sorry to see that, but I'm not surprised.

It's no surprise that Baltimore officials prefer the Believe slogan, which is painted on most of the park benches, or the beehive-hair "Hon" ladies, which they currently use to sell Charm Cards, but it's foolish for Bealefeld to deny the realism of The Wire, and foolish for him to assume that Wire fans don't see their own cities reflected in the show.