I started watching Homicide: Life on the Street this weekend, and one thing that struck me immediately was how the nature of crime and Baltimore's racial mix shift, in ways that seem to me to be related, from that show to The Wire.
In Homicide (at least in the first season), crime is mostly an amateur activity, one that can be, and is, undertaken by black and white people alike. In the initial shot of the prisoner holding tank in the show's debut episode, the suspects include two black men and a white woman. The first three murderers to be arrested in that episode, "Gone for Goode," are all white men. In the second episode, "Ghost of a Chance," one of the investigations focuses on the humorized murder of an older white man by his wife (also white), seen polishing silver in a knit suit; another white suspect is apprehended after the detectives in the case consult a ghost and tarot cards. In "Son of a Gun," aired third, a white woman hires a hit man to kill a coworker in an argument over whether Spiro Agnew deserves a bust in the Capitol. Of course, black people commit murder, or try to, on the show too, and their crimes are less likely to be portrayed in a humorous light. A black man shoots and blinds a police officer; another is suspected of raping and murdering a young girl. In Homicide, murder knows no limitations based on class, or race, or gender.
There are, however, hints that something's changing. When a young African-American boy gets hauled into the station on a mistaken assumption, Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) tells him "Son, there are a lot of black people have never been arrested." "I wouldn't know about that," the kid replies. That shadow of a shift in 1993 has grown into a corporeal in 2002, when The Wire premieres.
In the world of The Wire, the crime we see is professionalized, and is committed largely by black people. That's in part because the show focuses on an investigative crime unit, and on the drug crews it targets, but when the show ventures into the Homicide division in general, it's clear that most killings can be traced in some ways to those crews, whether it's the murder of a state's witness, of a drug kingpin's obsessive girl, or of a club owner turned double agent. The murders are rarely ever funny anymore, randomness has vanished from this category of crime, which is no longer about human passion and irrationality, but rather about money. There are white criminals on the show, of course, but like Nick and Ziggy in the show's second season, they're incompetent posers, or like The Greek, they are conspiratorial forces more than they are human, operating far above the street and the actual hands-on commission of crime. The vast majority of The Wire's criminals and victims are African-American. The kid who was terrified of having tossed a library book in the fifth grade in Homicide would have been a little hopper on The Wire: I almost wonder if he grew up from one show to the next, if a Wire character has his roots in that nervous child from Homicide.