Interpreting | 2009.09.01
Baltimore upon Thames? Not true, that | Misha Glenny
Chris Grayling sees The Wire in broken Britain. He might have watched it, but he doesn\'t get it
Last December I was treated for a tonsillar abscess at an emergency clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I commented to the doctor on how quickly I had been treated. "Hey," he replied gruffly, "if you wanna be bumped down the list all night by gunshot wounds, I can always send you over the river to Massachusetts General." And that\'s just Boston. Baltimore down in Maryland is in a different league.
I have always clung to the optimistic conviction that politicians can benefit from exposure to great art. So while it was encouraging to hear that Chris Grayling has watched most of season one of The Wire , I would urge the shadow home secretary to watch the rest of it because he still has a lot to learn about Baltimore.
Let me immediately quell his fears. I have been to both Moss Side and west Baltimore. Around the latter, I accompanied The Wire\'s creator, David Simon , who introduced me to many of the men and women who have to live in a society that has been completely discarded by the state and their fellow citizens.
I can happily reassure Grayling: west Baltimore has not come to Moss Side nor is it likely to in the foreseeable future so he may want to tone down his alarmist rhetoric which doesn\'t help the police or the communities involved.
I also ought to warn him he should avoid the wrath of Simon, who does not take kindly to politicians using his artistic output to bang on about law and order policies. "It is possible," he has observed , "that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: \'You are hopelessly full of shit\'."
It\'s worth throwing in a few stats here to temper Grayling\'s occasionally apocalyptic language that suggests urban civil war may have arrived on our streets. Inner-city Baltimore has a population of roughly 630,000. In 2008, police recorded 234 murders in the city, the great bulk of them in The Wire\'s location, West Baltimore, and the other predominantly black areas of the city. England and Wales by contrast boasts a population of over 52 million. In the year ending March 2009, there were 624 violent deaths here. So Baltimore has just over 1% of our population but over a third of the whole country\'s murder rate.
In Britain, a teenager being shot dead still makes the front-page across the country. In 2007, 51 out of 284 Baltimore murder victims were teenagers, their deaths so common they barely warranted a mention on the inside pages of the local press. Unsurprisingly, 91% of the slaughtered were black.
If we were to look at Chicago, which has seen a fearful upsurge in violence over the past few years, the comparison would be off the scale. Even sleepy Vancouver, in Canada\'s beautiful British Columbia, now has a much more serious problem with drug gang shoot-outs than Manchester does.
I have many criticisms of New Labour\'s kneejerk criminal justice strategies over the years, but there is absolutely no evidence of a rise in violent crime since they came to power. On the contrary, Britain has been steadily falling down the ladder internationally when it comes to murder stats. We now have 1.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, which puts us 46th in the world league table, below Finland, Iceland and Portugal, and streets behind the United States, which has nearly four times as many violent deaths.
The big difference with the US, of course, is gun control – even if you are controlling a major cocaine syndicate, procuring firearms in Britain is still a risky business. Gun and knife crime is a serious issue in inner-city Britain but it has not worsened in recent years, indeed knife crime is actually going down at the moment. The state of Maryland requires no permit for handguns, rifles or shotguns. Hang out in west Baltimore at night as I did with the local police and you can hear the result.
This does not mean that our inner-city communities do not face severe distress, nor should it minimise the damage wrought by the gangs, many of whose cultural references have been imported from the hoods of America. But the shadow home secretary should think very carefully about trying to exploit that distress to make political points. It was under the Tories that these ghettoes became the main focus of deprivation and violence in our society – or has Grayling forgotten Brixton and Broadwater Farm?
In order to save him from watching all five seasons, allow me to interpret the unambiguous message of The Wire: the war on drugs is what fosters violence and gangs in west Baltimore. It has ripped the heart and entrails out of the area, corrupted its police force and administration and achieved none of its stated aims. Now if Grayling were to acknowledge that, he might even win the approval of David Simon. You feel me?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]s-grayling-baltimore-gun-crime
