Homicide. David Simon
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some poor post officer sleeping in his radio car. Supervisors like that either grew into their jobs or their best men ducked and covered long enough to transfer to another sector.
Up in homicide, an authoritarian shift commander is even more likely to be held in contempt by his detectives—men who would not, in fact, be on the sixth floor of headquarters if they weren’t eighteen of the most self-motivated cops in the department. In homicide, the laws of natural selection apply: A cop who puts down enough cases stays, a cop who doesn’t is gone. Given that basic truth, there isn’t much respect for the notion that a cop shrewd enough to maneuver his way into homicide and then put together forty or fifty cases somehow needs to have a shift commander’s finger in his eye. Rank, of course, has it privileges, but a homicide supervisor who exercises his divine right to chew ass on every conceivable occasion will in the end create a shift of alienated sergeants and overly cautious detectives, unwilling or incapable of acting on their own instincts.
Instead, and at some cost to his own career, Gary D’Addario gave his men room to maneuver, providing a buffer against the captain and those above him in the chain of command. His method carried considerable risk, and the relationship between D’Addario and his captain had frayed around the edges during the last four years. By contrast, Bob Stanton, the other shift lieutenant, was a supervisor more to the captain’s liking. A buttoned-down veteran of the narcotics unit handpicked by the captain to command the second shift, Stanton ran a tighter ship, with sergeants exerting more overt control over their men and detectives pressured to hold down the overtime and court pay that lubricates the entire system. Stanton was a good lieutenant and a sharp cop, but when compared with the alternative, his frugality and by-the-book style were such that more than a few veterans on his shift expressed an eagerness to join D’Addario’s crusade at the first opportunity.
For the sergeants and detectives blessed by D’Addario’s benevolence, the quid pro quo was both simple and obvious. They had to solve murders. They had to solve enough murders to produce a clearance rate that would vindicate His Eminence and his methods and thereby justify his benign and glorious rule. In homicide, the clearance rate is the litmus test, the beginning and end of all debate.
Which is reason enough for D’Addario to stare long and hard at the red ink on his side of the board. Not only does the white rectangle offer ready comparisons between detectives, it offers the same superficial comparison between shifts. In that sense, the board—and the clearance rate it represents—has divided Baltimore’s homicide guard into separate units, each shift functioning independently of the other. Detectives old enough to have experienced life before the board remember the homicide unit as more of a single entity; detectives were willing to work cases that began or ended on another shift, knowing that credit for clearances would be shared by the entire unit. Created to promote cohesion and accountability, the board instead left the two shifts—and each of the six squads—to compete against each other in red and black ink for clearances, as if they were a pack of double-knit salesmen moving marked-down cars for Luby’s Chevrolet.
The trend began long before Stanton’s arrival, but the lieutenants’ different styles helped to highlight the competition. And for the last several years, detectives from one shift had interacted with those from the other only at the half-hour shift changes or on rare occasions when a detective pulling overtime on a case needed an extra body from the working shift to witness an interrogation or help kick down a door. The competition was always understated, but soon even individual detectives found themselves contemplating the white rectangle, silently computing clearance rates for opposing squads or shifts. That, too, was ironic, because every detective in the unit was willing to concede that the board was itself a flawed measurement, as it represented only the number of homicides for the year. A squad could spend three weeks of nightwork knee deep in police shootings, questionable deaths, serious assaults, kidnappings, overdose cases and every other kind of death investigation. Yet none of that would be reflected in black and red ink.
Even with the murders themselves, much of what clears a case amounts to pure chance. The vocabulary of the homicide unit recognizes two distinct categories of homicides: whodunits and dunkers. Whodunits are genuine mysteries; dunkers are cases accompanied by ample evidence and an obvious suspect. Whodunits are best typified by crime scenes where a detective is called to some godforsaken back alley to find a body and little more. Dunkers are best typified by scenes at which the detective steps over the body to meet the unrepentant husband, who has not bothered to change his bloodied clothes and requires little prompting to admit that he stabbed the bitch and would do so again given the chance. The distinction between cases that require investigation and cases that require little more than paperwork is understood and accepted by every man in the unit, and more than one squad sergeant has accused another of rushing a detective out to a call that sounded on the radio as if it were a domestic murder or, worse yet, ducking a call that had all the markings of a well-executed drug slaying.
The board, of course, does not delineate between dunkers solved by circumstance and whodunits solved by extended investigation: The ink is as black for one as the other. As a consequence, the resulting politics of whodunits and dunkers becomes part of the mind-set, so much so that veteran detectives watching an old western on the office television will always offer the same remark when gunfighters are shot down on frontier streets crowded with God-fearing townsfolk:
“Yeah, bunk. There’s a dunker.”
But dunkers had lately been few and far between for D’Addario’s shift, and the lieutenant’s dependence on both the board and the clearance rate had become even more acute in the wake of Worden’s investigation into the Monroe Street shooting of John Scott. The captain had taken the extraordinary step of removing both D’Addario and McLarney from the chain of command, ordering Worden and James to report directly to the administrative lieutenant. On one level, the decision to preempt McLarney made sense because he was close to so many of the patrolmen in the Western, some of whom were potential suspects in the murder. But D’Addario had no divided allegiances, and after nine years in homicide he had seen enough red balls to know the entire drill. The suggestion that he continue to devote his time to routine matters rather than contend with a sensitive investigation such as Monroe Street could only be taken as an insult. Inevitably, D’Addario’s relations with the captain were now more strained than ever.
Gary D’Addario was by reputation a man slow to anger, but Monroe Street had clearly shortened his fuse. Earlier that week, Terry McLarney had typed a routine memo requesting that two Western officers be detailed to homicide to help with an ongoing probe; he had then forwarded the missive directly to the administrative lieutenant, bypassing D’Addario. A minor oversight in chain-of-command courtesy, but now, in the quiet of the coffee room, D’Addario brings it up, using humor and overwrought formality to make his point.
“Sergeant McLarney,” he says, smiling, “while I have your attention I wonder if I might inquire as to an administrative matter.”
“That’s not my whiskey bottle in the top right drawer,” blurts out McLarney, straight-faced. “Sergeant Landsman put it there to discredit me.”
D’Addario laughs for the first time.
“And,” McLarney deadpans, “I would respectfully like to point out that Sergeant Nolan’s men have been using the cars without signing the vehicle book as I have properly trained my squad to do.”
“This is about another matter.”
“Something to do with conduct unbecoming an officer?”
“Not at all. This is purely administrative in nature.”
“Oh.” McLarney shrugs, sitting down. “You had me worried there for a second.”
“I’m just a little concerned because a certain memo you penned was addressed to a lieutenant in this police department other than myself.”
McLarney sees his mistake immediately. Monroe Street has everybody stepping light.
“I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”
D’Addario waves off the apology. “I just need to have your answer to one particular question.”
“Sir?”