"The Wire" distinguishes itself from a lot of other police shows with its down-and-dirty style. If you could put your finger on it, what's the key to achieving that kind of verisimilitude?

As a reporter I made a point of getting out of the newsroom. And I tried to spend more time with the people who were getting policed. I think one of the things that makes this thing feel real is that the bad guys in most cop shows are basically fodder for the cops: They're to be chewed on and spit out and rendered as archetypes. And I got no interest in that. Even the guys who have the capacity for being sociopaths have to be considered in human terms. It doesn't mean you give 'em a puppy, but it's about making everybody whole. Cop shows don't have room to do that. In one sense, the whole cop-show thing has been so calcified and entrenched that you basically have to take a chainsaw to it in people's minds.

In doing research for both of these series ["The Wire" and "The Corner"], you spent time in some of the most dangerous housing projects in Baltimore. What was that like?

You know, I'm gonna sorta subvert that and say I've never had any real problem introducing myself to people anywhere in Baltimore or asking their help. I felt very little resistance to anything I tried to do or anywhere I tried to go in the city, and that goes back to my time at the Sun. It ain't Beirut. We were treated as gracefully by people in some of these struggling places as I was in other parts of town. It has been so mythologized: People think you hop into your car and you immediately get ripped off, carjacked and shot three times in the head. I mean, we went to the same corner every day for a year and we got robbed once. It was by people who didn't know us, who were from another neighborhood; they thought we were white guys trying to buy dope, so they thought they were gonna get money or some vials. I don't want to go to the notion that I'm some fucking war correspondent.

Does dealing with bleak material ever get depressing for you?

The trick is to take what can become a calcified universe and try to find some new way to do it. It's kinda like blues music, you know. There's 12 bars. It's all the same. But if you're listening it's not. "Homicide" was still a show where you felt like they [the police] were doing God's work, and I don't buy that in the drug war. I think it may have begun nobly enough as this crusade against dangerous drugs, but it's become a war on the underclass. Wonderfully drawn as they were, you never felt that the guys in "Homicide" were anything but a band of brothers.

Not to open old wounds here, but was it tough to see "Homicide" fail to find a larger audience?

Yeah, I wanted that show to get attention 'cause I wanted to sell books. [NBC] didn't understand what they had in terms of the tone of the show. They would have meetings with the people who do the promos and Tom [Fontana] would complain that they weren't promo-ing the show. They would say, "Well, nobody's chasing anybody, there's no violence, there's no gunfights, and there's no ticking time bombs. What do you want us to promo, people talking to each other?" Well, yeah. [Laughs.]

The pilot of ["The Wire"] is very much the anti-pilot. The one thing it doesn't have is that sense of, "Are you gonna watch this show now? Are ya? Huh? Huh? Huh? If you don't come back we might kill this guy." That's what you have to do on network, 'cause if they don't come back, you're cancelled. On HBO it's like, "We're in it for the long haul. Tell the story in a smart way and we will bring people into the tent or we will die trying."

What first drew you to the world of police officers? You seem to have an endless fascination with how these people interact in and out of the workplace.

I think they're just wonderful vehicles for telling a story about the greater culture and the greater community. They intersect with every problem and foible and dysfunction that we have -- and they're compelled to react to that. I'm actually interested in a lot of different stuff, but I got stuck on the police beat. I wouldn't try to write a TV show about something I didn't know. I think it's a very funny and absurd existence to be a cop in America, particularly in a big city.

What is the cardinal sin most writers commit with cop characters?

They make them care. I mean, do you believe McNulty cares?

To be honest, I don't know. It's pretty ambiguous, actually.

Exactly. I wanted it to be ambiguous and I think there's a frightening aspect to McNulty, which is this: He cares about making the case, clearly. But does he care about the people he's making it for? Does he care about West Baltimore? Is he connected to these people in any empathetic way? And I'm not going near that until viewers are ready to accept the absolute truth of all the cops I've known, which is, the best you can hope for from a really good cop is that he cares about the game. To a good homicide detective, the murder is an affront to his intellectual vanity, and I mean that in the best possible way. "This fucker did this murder, I caught it, and he thinks he's fucking better than me. Fuck him. He's about to find out." That's a good cop. He could be class-conscious, racist, homophobic, sexist and still wanna solve the murder.

One of the best detectives I knew in Baltimore was a racist. He'd catch 12 murderers a year and all the victims would be black. But if a black family moved in next door, he'd run the father through the computer to find out if he had charges. It's who he was. Whenever the cop lifts the blanket and looks down at the body and says, "Jesus, what a waste" -- they never say that. [Laughs.] They never fuckin' say that. I think most cop shows think the guys are doing it because it fixes the neighborhood: "I care that the world gets better, therefore I police." Bullshit. So I wanna jettison all that.

Do you hope, in some way, that your shows might help to reform the institutions they explore?

I'll tell you what, this would be enough for me: The next time the drug czar or Ashcroft or any of these guys stands up and declares, "With a little fine-tuning, with a few more prison cells, and a few more lawyers, a few more cops, a little better armament, and another omnibus crime bill that adds 15 more death-penalty statutes, we can win the war on drugs" -- if a slightly larger percentage of the American population looks at him and goes, "You are so full of shit" ... that would be gratifying.

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