Legal Commentary

After Rick Pildes and other colleagues assured me that HBO's The Wire transcended all TV formulae for cop shows, I rented the first season and watched it sporadically with my wife. Artistically speaking, the show is outstanding. But naturally I am more interested in looking at what the show has to say about fundamental matters -- which, for me (of course) means federalism.

Sadly, the Wire followed the usual formula. Local police are focused on the nitty gritty of drug crime, trying to save West Baltimore. The feds are better dressed, more humorless, and have a senseless set of bureaucratic norms that prevent them from helping out the beleaguered local cops who want to bring the feds in to help with surveillance against a local drug boss. The feds refuse, because there is not a federal interest: They need an international drug cartel, an anti-terrorism angle, or political corruption in order to have a statutory mandate. One of the Baltimore cops storms out, telling the Deputy U.S. Attorney in Baltimore that he is an "empty suit" and not "real police": The feds, he rails, would let "West Baltimore burn" because of red tape. Although the show does an admirable job of suspending any overt judgment about its characters' actions, the sympathies that the scene is intended to elicit are apparent as the federal agents sit around the table looking sheepish and feckless.

From any sensible functional theory of federalism, however, the feds in The Wire were right to insist on a genuine federal interest -- and The Wire's own plot shows them to be correct. During the first season, the primary reason that the City cops could not collect evidence against the drug boss was political corruption in the state legislature: Eliminate the corruption, and the Baltimore police would be able to get the wire taps they needed.

That a popular TV show would miss the moral of the importance of limiting federal police power suggests, more than any judicial decision or federal statute, that federalism may be well and truly dead in the public's consciousness.