Note: I have delayed writing my followup piece to this article because of troubling revelations that have recently come to light about many of the detectives featured in David Simon’s original book and were the inspiration for so many of the characters in his TV series. That said, I now think this article is more relevant than when I was going to write because of what it says about policing in general.
Near the end of Season 4, in the episode ‘Scene of the Crime’, we meet for the first time Officer Stu Gharty, played by character actor Peter Gerety. Our introduction to him is when he is called in a Baltimore high rise where shots our being fired. He drives on to the scene, hears the shots and then runs back to his car.
Munch, working with Detective Megan Russert (I’ll come back to her character in a bit) are called out to the scene. Two African-American teenagers are dead, and it’s clear they shot and killed each other. “How often do you have a murder that solves itself?” Gharty asked almost casually as he shows them the bodies. Munch wants to write this up as ‘case closed’ as soon as possible, but Russert pushes forward, and learns that the mothers of the boys heard the shots, called 911 and no one responded for half an hour , even though the 911 call shows Gharty was on the scene..
Russert than goes to talk to Gharty, who goes as far as he can to obfuscate the situation. Munch keeps trying to give him an out saying he called for backup, but Gharty refuses to take it. Russert is more accusatory and says she could have stopped them. Gharty’s response is telling: “Stopped them how? Just me and my 9mm, I might as well go in waving a white flag….What are my options? I step inside that building. They shoot me, then finish each other off. Or worse. I kill a kid. He’s black, I’m white. His mother points the finger. The whole neighborhood’s raging against me, my face is on the front page, my family’s dragged through hell. Why should I take the risk?”
It’s worth noting how one of the quintessential books on the series Homicide: Life on the Screen, written in 1998 views both Gharty and Russert’s actions. They almost entirely empathize with the former. It’s actually stated directly: “How much bravery have we purchased for $35,000 a year plus benefits?” Then it looks at Russert, a character that the author considers ill-conceived at best as being weak because she forces Gharty to go before a board of inquiry for dereliction of duty. The fact that Giardello, a character that the series clearly admires, not only backs Russert’s play but completely defends her actions, is unmentioned in the book. For daring to take the position that a cop’s behavior is never one hundred percent defendable (in an earlier episode she testifies against Pembleton in a civil suit by a serial killer who accuses the city of violating her civil rights) she is considered wishy-washy or worse a bad cop. I’m not entirely certain if such an attitude was taken because Russert was a woman in the department, but when Gee takes a similar attitude with his detectives, he’s considered almost noble.
In any case, despite the fact that Gharty will eventually admit to Russert in private that he never called for backup, Gharty is acquitted by the board of inquiry. Gharty goes right back to work, and then things start getting harder to defend.
When we next see Gharty again, it’s the end of Season 5 and he is now a detective working at the Baltimore equivalent of Internal Affairs. Beau Felton, who I mentioned in the previous article about Homicide, has been found murder in his house, and it is eventually that he has been working undercover with Internal to discover a leak in an auto theft ring that the department has been trying to bring down. Gharty has essentially sent Felton into a more dangerous situation then he was ever willing to face himself, and there is a strong implication as the investigation concludes, that his misjudgment of someone in the ring who was already a department informant may have led to Felton’s murder.
No one in the squad thinks much of Gharty. Russert, who has since left the squad and has returned upon hearing of Felton’s death, remembers very well what he’s done and Pembleton is openly hostile because of his behavior in that situation. Gharty ‘seems’ to redeem himself in the eyes of the squad when he tells Frank that he puts himself in a jackpot situation – he got beat up by gangbangers and was hospitalized – and that has made him feel like a ‘real cop’.
The next season (due to a plotline based on a real-life decision the Baltimore Police Department) many of the detectives have been rotated from squad to squad on a three month basis. Pembleton and Bayliss return to the squad to learn that the new rising stars on none other than Gharty and his new partner Laura Ballard (Callie Thorne).
What becomes clear very quickly in the last two seasons of the series (Gerety was a regular for them) is that Gharty is more openly bigoted than perhaps any cop we would ever see on the series. In an opening three-part arc, a Haitian domestic who working for a high-class African American family, the Wilsons (patriarch Felix was played by James Earl Jones, the son and ultimate murderer was played by soon to be brilliant character Jeffrey Wright) is found dead in a hotel bathroom. The normally ruthless Pembleton is reluctant to investigate the Wilson clan with his usual ardor and Giardello, usually unafraid to break down barrier to solve a murder, seems more willing to defend them. Gharty is openly hostile to their approach and says as much to Ballard: “They’re covering Wilson’s ass because it’s the same color as theirs.”
Examples of his bigotry are not limited solely to African-Americans. In one Season 6 story he goes after a woman with AIDS who he believes killed the man who infected her with it far more aggressively than Ballard does. In another, when a drug dealer is killed by white drug killers, he contemptuously calls them ‘city goats’ and even though he’s the primary, he really doesn’t like the idea of spending weeks chasing them around Baltimore. Investigating the murders of two priests, his relationship to being Catholic comes into play, but in the final stages of the investigation he is removed from the case when he starts beating on a witness.
Indeed, Gharty is constantly in conflict with more members of the squad than any other detective. He constantly picks fights with Pembleton in Season 6 and he and Munch end up nearly coming to blows on two separate occasions. In a late season arc when Bayliss starts exploring his sexuality, he is vaguely bigoted towards it and is actually offended when Ballard goes out on a date with him. It is also worth noting that he is not a particularly good detective either – freeze frames of the board throughout the time on the series constantly show him with a clearance rate between 50 and 60 percent. While in the later seasons, clearance rates for every detective are shown as lower – a subtle acknowledgement of similar trends throughout Baltimore in general – he never comes across as a particularly rugged investigator the same way so many of the characters on the series, including his own partner, do.
Which is why perhaps the most subtly disquieting thing about Homicide: the Movie is where we find Gharty’s character in it. Giardello has left the department to run for mayor and Gharty has taken over as shift commander, supervising many of the detectives he once worked with. (Pembleton makes a very clear point about the job he’s doing when he looks at the board. ‘All these open cases.”)
When all the detectives end up showing up at the squad to help find who shot Giardello, Gharty doesn’t show clear leadership skills. Early in the movie, when Bayliss and Pembleton walk into the interrogation room, they see a rookie detective (played by Jason Priestley of all people) threatening to beat the witness down if he doesn’t cooperate. Gharty says: “This doesn’t represent how I run my squad.” Sure. After the detective nearly gets beat up by the witness, Pembleton and Bayliss come in and get the answers they need, and the detective is pushed aside by Gharty to get coffee. No matter how you look at it, Gharty handles this badly.
At every level of the investigation Gharty is shown at his worst. When Captain Gaffney, the scourge of Homicide shows up in the squad room to berate him for pulling the detective from the interrogation, Gharty not only wilts but apologizes to him. Then he ‘gets his lunch handed to him’ and Pembleton is exiled from the investigation. (He gets a measure of revenge by assigning that same detective to work ‘the tip line’.) But his methods of delegating in action are worse than his behavior in private. He sends Detectives Lewis and Rene Shepherd (two light skinned African Americans) to interrogate the head of an Aryan nation radio station and Munch and Bolander (two doughy middle aged white men) to interview the head of a militant African-American movement. When Munch gently suggest it might be more effective for the two teams to switch roles, rather than listen to a more experienced detective, Gharty snarls at him (no doubt let personal feelings cloud his judgment.) It is only near the end of the movie when Pembleton and Bayliss present Gharty with evidence of the possible killer and the lieutenant is reluctant to let them go that Gharty admits: “I had to get off the street. I’m a stooge. I know it.” Pembleton raises the specter of Gee’s belief in him to convince them to go forward and Gharty gives in.
But the message is a lot clearer by the end of the movie. The kind of cop that Pembleton represented and the lieutenant that Giardello was are no long part of this Baltimore PD. The unit is now led by a weak-willed, bigoted middle-aged man who will instantly roll over and not listen to the advice of people who might know better. And it is likely that all of the prejudices and approaches that Gharty has shown throughout his career in the department will influence everything the squad does from now. This may be a more haunting ending for the series than the fact that Giardello ends up dying of his wounds at the film.
This is, in fact, the main reason I think David Simon is wrong when he says that The Wire is far more realistic in its approach to policing that Homicide ever was. There’s actually more truth to that when you look at the bosses, which I’ll do when I come back to this series.
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