Keith Reed
Fri, January 14, 2022
The Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force was as rotten a squad as any detail in American policing. The public is just learning exactly how bad it was.
If there had been a sixth season of The Wire–and God, we wish there was–it would have been about the Baltimore Police Department’s historically corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Showrunners wouldn’t need to look far for source material, because a new report about the squad and how it came to be its own criminal enterprise reads like the best of creator David Simon’s scripts.
It has everything: Drug dealing cops who could’ve picked up where the infamous Stanfield and Barksdale crews left off, plainclothes detectives who took off stash houses with the effectiveness of Omar Little in his prime (RIP Michael K. Williams), plus beatings, shootings and enough institutional rot to thread a backstory about the steady decline of post-post-industrial urban America.
Just imagine this scene set in The Pit after D’Angleo Barksdale’s death in prison, or in one of the West Side rowhouses that once served as a Marlo Stanfield stash:
From the Baltimore Sun
One convicted officer who spoke to the investigative team, Victor Rivera, joined the force in 1994 and said he learned early from others how to get “down and dirty” — beating suspects who ran from them in order to teach them a lesson.
In 1997, during the execution of a residential search and seizure warrant, Rivera and a senior officer found cash, according to Rivera’s account. They exchanged a glance and a shrug. The supervisor, identified as William Knoerlein, allegedly took the money and shared a couple hundred dollars with Rivera after they left the scene, a practice that Rivera said continued for years.
“I’ve got dirt on you, you’ve got dirt on me,” Knoerlein allegedly told Rivera, who was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison last year for lying about stealing cocaine in 2009.
Riveting television, right? Come to think of it, that last part also has echoes of Denzel Washington’s psychopathic Alonzo Harris in Training Day.
If there had been a sixth season of The Wire–and God, we wish there was–it would have been about the Baltimore Police Department’s historically corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Showrunners wouldn’t need to look far for source material, because a new report about the squad and how it came to be its own criminal enterprise reads like the best of creator David Simon’s scripts.
It has everything: Drug dealing cops who could’ve picked up where the infamous Stanfield and Barksdale crews left off, plainclothes detectives who took off stash houses with the effectiveness of Omar Little in his prime (RIP Michael K. Williams), plus beatings, shootings and enough institutional rot to thread a backstory about the steady decline of post-post-industrial urban America.
Just imagine this scene set in The Pit after D’Angleo Barksdale’s death in prison, or in one of the West Side rowhouses that once served as a Marlo Stanfield stash:
From the Baltimore Sun
One convicted officer who spoke to the investigative team, Victor Rivera, joined the force in 1994 and said he learned early from others how to get “down and dirty” — beating suspects who ran from them in order to teach them a lesson.
In 1997, during the execution of a residential search and seizure warrant, Rivera and a senior officer found cash, according to Rivera’s account. They exchanged a glance and a shrug. The supervisor, identified as William Knoerlein, allegedly took the money and shared a couple hundred dollars with Rivera after they left the scene, a practice that Rivera said continued for years.
“I’ve got dirt on you, you’ve got dirt on me,” Knoerlein allegedly told Rivera, who was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison last year for lying about stealing cocaine in 2009.
Riveting television, right? Come to think of it, that last part also has echoes of Denzel Washington’s psychopathic Alonzo Harris in Training Day.
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