Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of us don’t know much about the Street. Not streets, in general, but the Street, proper noun. I make that assumption based on the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading this on Goodreads, which is just about as far from the Street as you can possibly get. I was born in the mostly-white suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. I lived across the street from a park, where people ice-skated in winter and played little league during the summer. If a cop came into my neighborhood, it was because our night games – capture the flag, ghosts and goblins – were disturbing the sleep of our neighbors. I went to a private school, along with all my friends. We all had stable families until our parents divorced, right on cue, as we entered college (and we all entered college). Such is the suburban life I led. The Street is different, as night is different from day, and as a punch in the groin is different from a bite of cake. I make no claims to any knowledge of the Street. Whatever faint knowledge I pretend to have comes from the bits and pieces gleaned from my clients in the public defenders’ office. It’s a place without young men and fathers, who are in jail, or absconded, or dead. As a result, there is no such thing as a regular peer group. Twelve year-olds hang out with nineteen year-olds, with predictable results. It’s a place where the commercial markets to which we’ve grown accustomed do not exist. There aren’t supermarkets, so if you want to go shopping, you better have a car or be willing to take the bus. If you want to shop local, the goods you purchase, from a store with iron gates over the windows, and the clerk behind bulletproof glass, you will – oddly, since this is an impoverished place – pay more than you would elsewhere. There aren’t banks, so if you’re lucky enough to get a paycheck, you have to go to EZ Check or Payday Express, where you lose up to 20% of that money. Since the normal cabs won’t come to this place, there are jitneys – unlicensed taxis – to ferry you from place to place. The jobs that exist here are service oriented and strictly local: hair stylists, child care, lawn care. Based on our whacky drug laws, the sharpest capitalists get into drugs, where you can make more in a couple hours than you could in a month.So, that’s the Street. And no Street compared to Baltimore in the 1980s where, in some years, there was almost a murder a day. That’s where David Simon’s classic, gripping, surprisingly powerful piece of journalism, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, takes place.Homicide belongs to that narrow genre of “year in the life of __" journalism, of which I am a devotee. I’ve read books about a year in the life of a firehouse, and a courthouse, and a public defenders office. Though I keep reading them, I’m always a little disappointed. The reason, I think, is that the main story – the events taking place during that particular year – often aren’t interesting enough to support a narrative; thus, you get a lot of filler (historical context, biographies, etc.)Unfortunately for the dead souls in Homicide, David Simon never came across that problem. There are enough murders to support a television show for seven seasons. A new case is breaking every other day, so that the detectives that Simon follows – the focus is on a single shift comprised of three squads – are always busy. The big case of the year is the rape and murder of a young girl, who’s eviscerated body is found dumped in an alley. In the afterword, Simon calls this case the “spine” of the book. I hate to disagree with the author, since he wrote this and all, but no single murder, not even one as horrible as the dead of a child, stands out. Indeed, they all start to blur together, which is sort of the point. In my opinion, the true framework of the book is a list of “rules” for a homicide detective (Rule One: “Everyone lies”). These rules are a jumping-off point for various discussions on topics such as Miranda warnings, probable cause, autopsies, and justifiable force. Simon deftly blends theses discussions into the narrative, so that things that would feel like digressions or filler in other books instead seamlessly becomes part of the story. For instance, here’s Simon’s inimitable way of explaining Miranda’s Fifth Amendment protections: The detective offers a cigarette, not your brand, and begins an uninterrupted monologue that wanders back and forth for a half hour more, eventually coming to rest in a familiar place: You have the absolute right to remain silent. Of course you do. You’re a criminal. Criminals always have the right to remain silent. At least once in your miserable life, you spent an hour in front of a television set, listening to this book-‘em-Danno routine. You think Joe Friday was lying to you? You think Kojak was making this horsesh*t u? No way, bunk, we’re talking sacred freedoms here, notably your Fifth Fu**ing Amendment protection against self-incrimination, and hey, it was good enough for Ollie North, so who are you to go incriminating yourself at the first opportunity? Get it straight: A police detective, a man who gets paid government money to put you in prison, is explaining your absolute right to shut up before you say something stupid.Homicide begins with a murder on January 19, and ends with a murder in December. In between, there are shootings, stabbings, beatings and suicides. Some get bludgeoned, others strangled. Every once in awhile there’s even a natural death (these still has to be investigated by the homicide squad if it appears suspicious). It’s a catalogue of darkness and evil, and for the first hundred pages or so, I found the book almost unbearably suffocating. It’s like the movie Se7en, all darkness and rain and inhumanity, but without the ability to get lost in Brad Pitt’s eyes. All the detectives tend to blur together; they all talk tough, with a certain coarse indifference that is a shield against the grim realities of their calling. The victims are dehumanized and, just as important, so are the detectives. It doesn’t help that so many of the detectives have similar names: at the start, it’s tough to separate your Worden from your Waltemeyer, or tell McLarney from McAllister. And good luck differentiating Edward Brown from David Brown. They all seem as one: hard, unfeeling, tough, and eloquently blasphemous. Over time, and 500 more pages, that starts to change. Despite the fact that you almost never learn about these men’s personal lives, and never follow them home (though you follow them to many, many bars), all nineteen of the detectives in Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s shift become sharply-etched individuals. You get to understand their strengths, their weaknesses; their talents and their shortcomings; how they investigate crimes and how they interact with their colleagues. Homicide subtly gains power as it moves forward, so that by the time the final page comes, and you have to leave these detectives behind, you’re grateful that your edition of the book comes with Simon’s 2006 afterword, so you can find out what has happened to these men in the decades following publication. Simon is best known for HBO’s The Wire. As such, it was no surprise that Homicide wonderfully catches the hilariously profane, idiomatic, and often surprisingly evocative dialogue heard on the Street. But Homicide is much more than premium-cable-ready one-liners. It is a work of reporting so impossibly detailed that it boggles my mind how Simon was ever able to compile this information, and then shape it into a coherent work. At six hundred pages, Homicide qualifies as an epic of the Street. Simon takes you, as expected, to dozens of murder scenes, in a variety of alleys, tenements, and curbsides. He also provides a retrospectively-nostalgic glimpse into an 80’s-era precinct house, complete with b&w analogue television sets, typewriters, and cops who weren’t afraid to have a beer on the job. Beyond that, Simon leads you – Virgil-like – into the autopsy room, and the prosecutor’s office, and, in a great set-piece, through the trial of an alleged cop-shooter. This is a masterpiece. Simple as that. It resonates. It gets beneath your skin. It takes you someplace you’ve probably never been, and you start to get that vicarious thrill until you realize, as hard as it is, that this is a real place, and not a nightmare conjured from a dark imagination. A couple parting thoughts:First, Homicide was written during the advent of DNA analysis. If you believe Simon, in the afterword, police work hasn’t changed much in the years since publication. He writes that cops still rely on their gut instincts, their intuition, and their tried-and-true interrogation techniques. I have a hard time believing that. Not the part about the DNA, necessarily, but certainly the enhanced interrogation techniques practiced by Baltimore’s finest. Some of the stunts these detectives pulled come straight out of LA Confidential. Nowadays, most police forces, as a matter of practice, record all interrogations on video (I know, at least, that this is the practice of our police department, and we’re not exactly on the leading edge of things). Any defense attorney who saw a recording of one of these interrogations would have a hard time believing he or she wasn’t in heaven. It’s not just that the things these guys were doing were unconstitutional, it’s that they were so unconstitutional as to defy belief. Secondly, the streets of Baltimore are an alien world to most readers of Homicide. Simon makes it all the more alien by telling his story entirely from the point of view of the mostly-white detectives who enter and exit this mostly-black enclave. While we eventually learn a great deal about these detectives, we never learn anything about the victims, or the people who populate these mean streets. The effect is to humanize the cops while turning the victims and the criminals into animals. This isn’t a criticism so much as it is an observation. Indeed, Simon switched points of view in his follow-up, The Corner. Yet it’s worth bearing this one-sidedness in mind while reading Homicide. It is so relentless, so committed to its story, that you start to lose the larger context of failed drug laws, failed schools, poverty, and the legacy of racism that has created these streets. You also forget that when you close the book, finally able to escape, that the streets do not disappear. They are still out there, whether we are thinking about them or not.
There are some books which demand a certain amount of respect that exists quite apart from however much you happen to enjoy reading them. But this is one of those rare texts which is both an important social document and is also accessible, fun reading. It’s a work of journalistic non-fiction presented in a novelistic style, and was the product of a year in which the author embedded himself in the Baltimore police department’s Homicide squad; with official blessing, he sat in on all kinds of work, and the result is an astonishingly frank portrayal of the way that one of the most challenging jobs in America gets done. I did hesitate to use the word ‘fun’ in the context of reading this book because the subject matter is so serious, but if I’m honest that’s really the only one that’ll do: this is over six hundred single-spaced pages in the paperback edition, but it never felt like heavy going. The author is an excellent writer, and dedicates himself entirely to addressing each and every preconception a reader might have about police work. It isn’t about kicking down doors and waving a gun around; the cold reality of the situation usually exists long after any action has occurred, and mostly seems to involve talking to all kinds of people who just want to lie to you. For all the frequent changes in tone, it’s remarkable how effortless the author makes the narrative seem. It is clearly the product of an enormous amount of work, and it was enough to make me feel somewhat ashamed of my own career, my own piddling literary efforts. Though the author seems most comfortable with straightforward journalistic reportage, the prose frequently shifts into a more intimate psychological register when examining the motivations and anxieties of the men at the heart of this department. Most remarkable are the moments when the author hits Pause on the flow of the story and steps forward to really explain something to the reader. In any other context and with any other writer I’m sure I would find these parts questionable, but such is the confidence, authority and panache on show here that I couldn’t help but be carried away. It turns out that for the most part, murder itself is not an especially complicated business. There are no complex Agatha Christie contrivances here, nor is there any messing about with the existential conventions of Noir fiction. Most of the cases here fall into two broad categories: the ‘dunkers’, where the nature of the crime, the evidence and the likely perpetrator are immediately obvious; and the ‘whodunits’, which are the relatively few cases where there is a genuine mystery as to what took place. The gap between these two experiences is quite considerable. The most disturbing suggestion to take away from this book is the idea that: ‘there is too such a thing as a perfect murder’; that no matter how heinous the crime, there’s a good chance that the person who did it will get away with it. And not because the detective did anything particularly wrong, or the perp did anything particularly right: but because actually catching somebody, and proving that they did it beyond reasonable doubt in court, is such a huge and complicated and difficult task that so much of it depends on luck as much as hard legwork on the part of the police. But that's not to say that the hard work doesn't matter.The book also lifts the lid on the aspects of police work that many readers are less likely to be familiar with. In this regard, the detectives could make for a fascinating case study in management science and politics. Internal tensions are stoked by the presence of a whiteboard in the office listing all the open cases and to whom they are assigned; to please the bosses, the aim simply becomes to change those names from red to black, signifying that they’ve been closed. This can actually mean all kinds of things in terms of justice — but for the bosses, the important thing is that the murder clearance rate stays at or above the national average. And then there's the 'Red Ball' cases; those which come along once every so often and demand a greater level of attention simply because society demands that police throw every resource they can muster into closing the case. One thing worth stressing is that this book is absolutely on the side of the police. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that it exists entirely within the police, and looks at the world as they see it. Their prejudices and problems are documented without much in the way of dispute from the author; he is an invisible presence throughout, his own traces concealed from the events which transpire. While it does contain the seed of the author’s later work as the creator of ‘The Wire’ — and there are at least one or two anecdotes which are directly reproduced in that show — it never crosses the thin blue line which separates the police from their suspects, nor does the book spend much time with the victims and the rest of society. It isn’t that the author has no sympathy or interest in those perspectives: they’re just outside the scope of the book. For all that the author declares his intent to ‘demystify’ the role of the American detective, it’s fairly clear that he retains a deep admiration for the work of the oldest and most experienced figures here — and a special contempt for those who would get in their way — and this admiration frequently manifests itself as something approaching nostalgia for a hypothetical better age of policing. I don’t think the author is calling for a police state. But while there’s awareness of how brutal things were back before the police received such scrutiny, there’s also a longing here for a kind of definitive authority-figure in society; not a fascist thing by any means, but some kind of old-fashioned sheriff figure who would have the strength to defy politics and pursue justice on a higher plane. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is that the author shows enough awareness of his own soapboxing tendencies to keep them on a short leash.
What do You think about Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets (2006)?
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets written by David Simon is a non-fiction account about the time he spent with Baltimore police department homicide squad.For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he’s finished. The attitude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment—all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don’t.David Simon joined the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit as a “police intern” in 1988. During that year 234 cases of homicide took place in the city of Baltimore. This book provides a frank, detailed insight into the city's murders and the homicide detectives who solve them. The character of each detective is portrayed brilliantly as they all have their personalities and flaws and approaches to how an investigation should be run. This book also notes how TV has skewed jurors’ perception of what evidence is required for a guilty verdict. These real-life cases are compelling and heartbreaking and also show how the detectives' practiced emotional distance from these cases is essential for their ability to function.
—Rishabh
This is probably the best true crime book ever unless you can show me that all that stuff in Dostoyevsky really happened, in which case he's probably got the edge. The story is fairly familiar I think but to summarise - David Simon was a journalist & came up with the idea of spending a year embedded (so we now call it) with the Baltimore Homicide Unit, wrote a series of articles for the Baltimore Sun, they got turned into this book, then two years after that the book became the series Homicide : Life on the Street (I know, crap title), then DS wrote The Corner about the drug trade in Baltimore and that became a mini-series and then he created The Wire and that one everyone knows about. I'll stop there.So this guy has written the best true crime book and created the best and the third best tv shows of all time (Sopranos being No 2). This guy is an American national treasure. He's also really arrogant as can be read in a very self-regarding introduction to the book of the The Wire ("So then I decided to create a tv show which would forever redefine the way we watch tv").Homicide the book is really different from Homicide the tv show. Both are complete genius and are hereby UNRESERVEDLY RECOMMENDED TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE WHO CAN STILL READ OR ORDER DVDS FROM AMAZON. Both in their own way make you laugh and cry and howl and bark and make hissing sounds and imitate the well known painting The Scream.SOME QUOTESDetective John Munch : Our day begins when yours ends.*Detective Steve Crosetti: Either it's murder, or this library has a very strict overdue policy.*Det. Tim Bayliss: Fourteen years old... When I was fourteen, jeez, I was in the ninth grade, and I don't remember much of what I was doing, but I know I was nowhere close to picking up a gun and shooting another kid. Det. Frank Pembleton: How old should our shooter be? Det. Tim Bayliss: Not fourteen. Det. Frank Pembleton: So if he's what, fifteen, sixteen years old, it makes any more sense? Det. Tim Bayliss: No. Det. Frank Pembleton: How old should he be then? What's the cut off age? Seventeen? Eighteen? Det. Tim Bayliss: I don't know, but not fourteen. Det. Frank Pembleton: When you find out, clue me in, awright? I'd like to know when any of this killing, at any age, from six to sixty, makes any sense. One time I want to hear about a murder that makes sense. Just one time. For any reason.*Det. John Munch: I took the liberty of having my craw removed years ago so that I could sleep at night.*[Bolander sees bird droppings on his car] Det. Stan Bolander: Would you look at this? Pigeons! Det. John Munch: Not from a pigeon, it's from a waterfowl. Det. Stan Bolander: A what? Det. John Munch: A waterfowl. From a mallard. Det. Stan Bolander: A duck? Det. John Munch: A well-fed duck. Det. Stan Bolander: Right, like you can tell the difference. That couldn't come from a seagull, I suppose? Det. John Munch: No, gulls have a milky white splurter. Notice the lobular pattern, these splays within splays. Det. Stan Bolander: Munch... why do you know these things?
—Paul Bryant
Simon's writing is very engaging and he has the non-fiction narrative down to a science. The book has more of a novel feel then a biography of the people involved yet never feels like fiction. More importantly this is one of the few books of this style where you don’t feel the author has turned himself into a character. Other books of the same genre, such as Homicide Special, try for the same thing but don’t get close. In those books the reader can still feel the writer in their presence. On top of that the detectives he picks are interesting. Each fits a different cop/detective stereotype yet Simon is good at showing you their full personality so they never feel like a stereotype.More importantly the cases the officers work on are all pretty engaging. They have been picked because they are either interesting or representative of a type of case the homicide department regularly faces. What you don’t get are cases that are slam dunks and some of them are not even solvable. Many authors would feel a need to make their book wrap up completely with all of the cases coming to some kind of conclusion. I applaud Simon for not giving in to that temptation.If you are interested in detective work, true crime, or just getting the feeling of what it is to be a cop in a big city this is an excellent read. I highly recommend this book.
—Travis Starnes
