I fundamentally disagree with that take. The Wire doesn’t have to mention it, it literally shows that policing is systemically racist, so while no singular cop regularly expresses racist views, and can be quite diverse in race themselves, they still end up treating the places they patrol, which are by and large poor black communities, as their personal fiefdoms, where they believe that they have carte-blance to ‘fight crime’ even as they commit crimes (like constant reckless DWI, that even ‘good police’ do) to no actual positive effect on the neighborhood because there is no trust in the police, because there is no reason to trust them.

What the Wire is guilty of is having characters who we are supposed to think are smart (Bunny Colvin) wax on about a time when it wasn’t like this and blame it on the War on Drugs policy, which is some grade-A rose tinted glasses. But I like to think that it just portraying a guy who thinks like that (who may exist in the police), and not the writers actual opinion of historical policing.

Herc especially is portrayed as the stereotypical cop, a mildly racist buffoon who is so incompetent at his job that despite failing upwards the only actually good police work he does is when he has been fired from the police and now works as a PI for the lawyer of the very drug dealers that got him fired. We are supposed to be following the last few ‘good po-lice’, not necessarily the average cop, though them and their work do come up quite often. And pretty much all the cops are shown to be cowards who never do anything without a massive force disparity.

What we don’t get is the openly racist cop who never gets any punishment and still continues to move up the ranks, but idk if that works for Baltimore particularly as a setting.