The Tea Party vs. The Wire

In Season 3, Episode 4 of the HBO series The Wire, Major “Bunny” Colvin, a senior black police commander assigned to Baltimore’s violent western police district, is interviewed by two white officials from Johns Hopkins University who want to persuade him to leave the city police force to run the school’s security force. One of the recruiters gets up, saying he has to “tinkle” in the “little boys room.” The other recruiter, a former policeman himself, explains to an incredulous Colvin, “You’ll get used to these academic types, Bunny, especially when you get that first paycheck.” Colvin decides to stay with the City of Baltimore, where he organizes, in response to relentless political pressure to get the murder rate down, a zone of de facto legalized drugs, into which he tries to push all of his district’s drug traffickers and users. (The new residents take to calling the neighborhood “Hamsterdam.”) The season ends with Colvin being unceremoniously fired when his scheme, despite its success in cutting the murder rate, is exposed by the press.