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You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is.

David Simon

New York

Looking Behind The Mask

David Simon sees things most of us overlook. Perhaps he learned to look at the world differently, some might say more pessimistically, while a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Then he turned to writing books and later television dramas portraying life on our nation’s streets. Simon’s success in dramatic writing is underscored by his 12 years working the city desk for the Sun where he learned to distinguish between the American Dream and the American Reality.

In the last decade, David Simon’s work has aimed at telling his fellow citizens that what they see on the news is often, perhaps at times even intentionally, an illusion. Simon’s dramatic series ( Homicide: Life on the Street,  HBO mini-series The Corner, and most recently the HBO television series The Wire ) reflect a nation at war with itself. The nation Simon portrays is infected with a drug culture it is unable to control and unwilling to tolerate. Just as in the real America, the characters in his immensely successful HBO series The Wire, openly game the system and juke the stats to make whatever it is they are doing seem right, or successful, or somehow normal.

Big Media Journalism: Gaming The System, Juking The Stats

The world David Simon tell us about is not pretty — for we have become a nation predisposed to gaming the system and juking the stats. For many, today’s America is populated by people willing to do anything to achieve their goals, attain power, keep their jobs, or conceal reality. In Simon’s view of America the police lie, cheat, steal and sometimes kill. Politicians are shady, if not outright crooks. Simon’s point is not only to show us how we really are, but to compare today’s America to that of our parents and grand parents. His aim seems less likely to tell us how wonderful American life used to be than it is to how sordid, devious and crooked it has become.

As has been the recent case of comedian Jon Stewart undertaking to do what big media journalist dare not — Simon tells us what matters most by showing us what’s real, where we are today in comparison to our collective dreams of a grand nation born of truth, independence, civility and integrity. While Jon Stewart uses comic astonishment to get across his attack on the failures of big media journalism, politicians and financiers, David Simon employs dramatics to tell us things few American want to hear.

They do so, knowing that as a nation, we far prefer the illusory America we see in advertising and the inconsequential information presented to us as news. While Simon prefers to address these issues by way of police dramas, Stewart goes after television personalities, newsmen, politicians and journalists who routinely game the system, or juke the stats for their own benefit.

Looking Behind The Mask

In a recent appearance on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, David Simon spoke directly to the pervasive spread of failed ethics, failed responsibility and abdication of accountability by what appear to be ever increasing numbers of ordinary Americans. His point is that all of us at times game the system for our own benefit, and juke stats to make ourselves look better.

• Our bankers take TARP monies to save them from bankruptcy then double or triple credit card interest rates claiming that doing so is somehow to the benefit of ordinary Americans.
• Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and other securities ratings firms knowingly issue  inaccurate or false securities ratings to increase their own profits.
• Brian Williams looks you in the eye and claims to be a legitimate journalist even as he billboards features and promotions that benefit himself, NBC and General Electric.
• The worlds’ largest insurance company foolishly decides to speculate on mortgage-backed securities with your money.
• Sam Zell purchases the Tribune Company claiming he is there to save it when in reality his reliance on massive debt cements its fate with bankruptcy.

No matter the damage done by these and other recent failures to deal with reality, the widespread damage spoken to by men such as Jon Stewart and David Simon is that gaming the system and junking the stats behavior has become so widespread in American culture that it threatens us as a nation, and devalues us as a people.

Consider this exchange between Bill Moyers and David Simon:

PBS Transcript

Bill Moyers’ Journal [ David Simon Segment ]
Airdate: April 17, 2009

DAVID SIMON: . . . one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who’s become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It’s called “juking the stats.” Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don’t get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can’t.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I’ve been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that’s driving the war on drugs, though, right? The stats, not the-

DAVID SIMON: Dope on the table. Stats, you know, “We’ve made so many arrests.” I mean, they used to ride around Baltimore under one administration, and say, “If we can make 54 arrests a day, we’ll break the– we’ll have an all-time record for drug arrests.”

DAVID SIMON: Some of the arrests, well, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that.

So, I would be– I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was, you know, you would look outward. But if you looked inward you’d see that the same game is played everywhere. That nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution’s supposed to do.

BILL MOYERS: And there’s a wonderful scene in which this kid, himself, talks to the teacher about the hypocrisy of the very system that you’ve just described. Take a look.

[...]

NAMOND BRICE: Like y’all say, don’t lie, don’t bump, don’t cheat, don’t steal or whatever. But what about y’all? What, the government, Enron, steroids? Yeah, liquor business, booze– the real killer out there? And cigarettes, oh [deleted]. You got some smokes in there?

FEMALE TEACHER: I’m trying to quit.

SOT: STUDENT 2: Drugs paid your salary, right?

HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN: Not exactly, but I get your point.

NAMOND BRICE: We do the same thing as y’all, except when we do it, it’s like, “Oh my God, these kids is animals!” It’s like, it’s the end of the world coming. Man, that’s bull [deleted]. ‘Cause this is like, what, hypocrite? Hypocritical.

[...]

BILL MOYERS: I mean, they see the system, don’t they?

DAVID SIMON: Yes. Listen, the drug war lands in their neighborhood. They see the absurdity of it. They see the corruption. They see that it’s less about protecting their neighborhood than making stats.

BILL MOYERS: But how is it, given what– so many people could see what you saw if they simply, if we opened our eyes. And yet, the drug war keeps getting crazier and crazier. From selling guns to Mexico’s drug cartel, to cramming more people into prison, even though they haven’t committed violent crimes. Why don’t the policies change?

DAVID SIMON: Because there’s no political capital in it. There really isn’t. The fear of being called soft on crime, soft on drugs. The paranoia that’s been induced.

Listen, if you could be Draconian and reduce drug use by locking people up, you might have an argument. But we are the jailing-est country on the planet right now. Two million people in prison. When I started as a police reporter, 33, 34 percent of the federal inmate population was violent offenders. Now it’s like, seven to eight percent. So, we’re locking up less violent people. More of them. The drugs are purer. They’ve not– they haven’t closed down a single drug corner that I know of in Baltimore for any length of time. It’s not working. And by the way this is not a Republican/Democrat thing. Because a lot of the most Draconian stuff came out of the Clinton Administration. This guy trying to maneuver to the center, in order not to be perceived as Leftist by a Republican Congress.

BILL MOYERS: So, he did what?

DAVID SIMON: Oh, I mean, you look at all the stuff that got added to the Federal Omnibus Crime Bill. All the new categories of crime and the Draconian nature. There’s all of this preceded him by a little bit. He reinforced it, which was the federal sentencing guidelines, which are just appalling. You know, he had-

BILL MOYERS: Mandatory sentences, three strikes–

DAVID SIMON: Loss of parole. And again, not merely for violent offenders, because again, the rate of violent offenders is going down. Federal prisons are full of people who got caught muling drugs, and got tarred with the whole amount of the drugs. It’s not what you were involved in or what you profited from. It’s what they can tar you with. You know, a federal prosecutor, basically, when he decides what to charge you with and how much, he’s basically the sentencing judge at that point. What they charge. And that’s, of course, corrupting. It’s, again, a stat.

BILL MOYERS: It’s also clear from your work that you think the drug war has destroyed the policemen.

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely. That’s the saddest thing in a way, is that, again, because the stats mean nothing. Because a drug arrest in Baltimore means nothing. Nothing. Real police work isn’t being done. In my city, the arrest rates for all major felonies have declined, precipitously, over the last 20 years. From murder to rape to robbery to assault.

BILL MOYERS: Because?

DAVID SIMON: Because to solve those crimes requires retroactive investigation. They have to be able to do a lot of things, in terms of gathering evidence that is substantive and meaningful police work. All you have to do to make a drug arrest is go in a guy’s pocket. You know? You don’t even need probable cause anymore in Baltimore. The guy who solves a rape or a robbery or a murder, he has one arrest stat. He’s going to court one day. The guy who has 40, 50, 60 drug arrests, even though they’re meaningless arrests, even though there’s no place to put them in the Maryland prison system, he’s going go to court 40 or 50 or 60 times. Ultimately, when it comes time to promote somebody, they look at the police computer. They’ll look and they’ll say, “This guy’s made 40 arrests last month. You only made one. He’s the Sergeant.” You know, or, “That’s the Lieutenant.” So the guys who basically play the stat game, they get promoted.

So here we have two experienced journalists discussing one of the most pressing issues facing our nation today who find it necessary to address those issues through a dramatic intermediary becasue the subject is taboo in a self-absorbed and largly ignorant nation and not covered by big media journalism.