POLICE
Deputy Commissioner Rawls (John Doman)
Pugnacious and demanding, Rawls oversees Homicide and, at the beginning of the third season, has been elevated to deputy commissioner. Rawls' longest-standing grudge is against Jimmy McNulty, who first raised Rawls' ire by failing to keep his mouth shut about Homicide's inability to go after the big players in West Baltimore's drug trade, and has never lived it down. It was Rawls who sent McNulty to boat duty after the Barksdale case at the end of Season 1, and who did everything he could to keep McNulty off Daniels' team during the investigation of the docks (Season 2). Now Rawls spends his days bawling out cops who can't connect the dots.

Major Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom)
An extremely minor character in Season 2, Colvin appears to be shaping up as one of the primaries in Season 3. His officers, including Herc and Carver, cover the Western District. As the season opens, Colvin, fed up with the never-ending battle against low-level drug dealers, announces to his police that they're going to go about things a different way.

Major Valchek (Al Brown)
A stubborn crank who instigated Season 2's investigation of the docks in order to gain an advantage over Frank Sobotka in a petty debate over who -- his police union or Sobotka's longshoreman's union -- could finance a bigger church window. That the investigation ruined Sobotka's life seemed to bother Valchek not at all. Valchek also managed to alienate his son-in-law, Prez, to such a degree that Prez hauled off and slugged him in front of the entire team. As Season 3 begins, Valchek sets up a private meeting between Commissioner Burrell and Councilman Tommy Carcetti.

Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick)
Clean-cut, hard-assed and intelligent, Daniels got placed by Burrell on the Barksdale case with strict instructions: Keep the case small, come in with a few arrests, and you'll be on your way to major. Instead, Daniels oversaw the investigation's growth, incurring the wrath of his superiors and the politicians -- including State Sen. Clay Davis -- whose campaign contributions his staff checked out. His reward for the Barksdale case was a demotion to the evidence room, and it looked like his path was clear: resign, take the bar, and become a big-firm lawyer, the path pushed by his ambitious wife, Marla Daniels, whose own political ambitions may soon conflict with his interoffice politics. But he was drawn into Season 2's dockworker investigation, spearheading that for Valchek in hopes of bringing himself "up from the basement," much to his wife's annoyance. Season 3 sees him leading a new unit specializing in large-scale investigations, but estranged from his wife, leasing a small apartment, and sleeping with Rhonda Pearlman.

Asst. State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy)
Though she's officially a state's attorney, Pearlman is in the police section because she spends her time coordinating the legal side of the various police investigations. It's she who got D'Angelo Barksdale to agree to testify against his uncle (before his mother convinced him otherwise), and who worked out deals with Frank and Nick Sobotka as well. A long-running on-and-off affair with Jimmy McNulty (she was at least one of the reasons his marriage fell apart) seems currently off, as at the beginning of Season 3, she seduced Daniels.

Herc & Carver (Domeneck Lombardozzi and Seth Gilliam)
Always seen as a pair, Herc and Carver have worked together for years, in Narcotics, on Daniels' special investigative units, and now under Bunny Colvin in the Western District. Working with Daniels taught them that busting heads wasn't the only way to work a case, but both officers got frustrated when they felt they were being used for simple-minded busywork and left Daniels' unit at the end of Season 2. (Carver's relationship with Daniels is especially fraught; Daniels caught him snitching to Burrell during the initial Barksdale investigation.) The two are not above a little healthy corruption; they've been known to pocket wads of cash found in stash houses and fabricate informants to justify unauthorized wiretaps. They are given showpiece girlfriends from time to time, but basically function as a funny, bickering married couple.

Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West)
The heart, soul and oft-impaired nervous system of "The Wire" is McNulty, the fiercely smart, stupidly fierce investigator whose ill-thought-out bitching to Judge Phelan set the events of Season 1 into motion. While he seems to fail at most things in his life, he's a cop who gets his teeth in a case and shakes it until something real falls out. His passion for the Barksdale case pushed the investigative unit to greater heights and pushed Daniels to care about what seemed like a career dead-end. Exiled to the marine unit after the Barksdale case, he found a way back into the building at Homicide by bringing in Omar as a witness on an old case going to trial. From there, he wreaked havoc on his old partners, sticking Rawls with 14 Jane Does by proving that the dead prostitutes belonged in his jurisdiction; then, with Daniels' help, he returned to the investigative team. The scene that perfectly encapsulates Jimmy McNulty occurred late in Season 2: fresh off drunk-dialing ex-wife Elena from a bar, McNulty misjudges a turn in the rain and hits a bridge abutment, smashing off his side-view mirror. He stumbles from the car, maps out the turn he knew he made with his hand, gets back in the car, backs up, and, radio blaring, careens through the turn again, this time ripping up the car's entire right side. It's that stubbornness, that refusal to be wrong, that makes Jimmy McNulty good police. Sure, he cares about the lives ruined by every homicide -- a little. But it's ego that drives the best detectives, as "The Wire" is one of the few shows to make clear.

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