Idris Elba did a pretty good job in Luther, as well.
And Ultraviolet (the TV show, not the movie).
Oh, I don’t begrudge him anything. My love for Omar is a complicated love.
Yes X 10 for each.
So, does anyone think that Stringer as a character was kind of a douche? He was tall and had an imposing voice, but all he ever did, basically, was fuck up. He tried to apply his Econ101 knowledge to drug dealing and failed at it. He tried to go into legitimate business and got robbed. Finally, he had a confrontation with Avon where he basically brought a knife to a gunfight and paid the consequences. Oh, and he tried to manipulate Omar into killing someone for him, which actually just made him another enemy. He looks and sounds cool, but he’s actually a stuffed shirt.
I remember it being a bit more nuanced than that. He was naive about things, but he was right to recognize the problems with the glorified gangster lifestyle Avon was quicker to embrace. And I don’t mean like, flashy wealth, which they both avoided, but Avon’s eagerness to just fight their way through any problems.
Stated another way, I think that Stringer realized the type of management that relied purely on physical brutality had a short life-span; eventually, you get older and someone younger, faster, and stronger will come along.
Stringer wanted something easier, that lasted longer. He was trying to set up a system, essentially trying to create something that would generate cash perpetually. He wanted to be a real businessman; he wanted to stop working day-to-day to keep the empire pieced together and start living off of returns from the system he was trying to put in place.
Enh. String and Avon both recognized that people in the drug business inevitably wound up either dead or in jail. Avon accepted this fatalistically. String came up with a plan to reduce the risk and increase the profits in the short to medium term, and to potentially go legit in the long term.
He ran into 3 bits of wildly bad luck.
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McNulty expending a completely unforeseeable amount of energy on the death of DeAngelo Barksdale.
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2 incredibly deadly guys who, when set against each other, managed not to kill each other in any way, but actually formed an alliance.
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Having a new rival who was a complete sociopath, unwilling to make beneficial deals that would have given String the breathing room to pivot the Barksdales off of a war footing and onto either a sort of more or less genteel organized crime setup, or even possibly complete legitimacy.
His setbacks with the zoning and all of that were really kind of minor in the long term, there still would have been plenty of money and plenty of real estate to get into, and he would have learned this new game. Avon could have been brought around into his way of thinking if things had been calm enough long enough for Avon to see the sheer upside. String just ran out of time. A few coin flips go the other way, he retires as a respected businessman and developer with a colorful past.
He tried to change the game. But the game is the game, whether you’re a pawn or the king, the game doesn’t change. That’s the underlying theme of the whole show.
One of the strangest things to me about this show and other shows and movies is the complete disregard for police action. Maybe it’s really like that in these cities, but it’s pretty easy to be a badass when you’re willing to shoot someone in broad daylight and apparently get away with it most of the time. All Brother Mouzone and Omar had were big yarblockos and apparently the immunity of zero police presence in the community. Stringer couldn’t fight that, no one can fight that. If you can kill with impunity then there is no social structure that can withstand your influence.
Stringer also suffered from arrogance. As he got smarter and took more and more classes he started seeing “uneducated” as “unintelligent.” Applied to guys like Omar and the Brotherhood guy that can be (and was) ignorant, naive and lethal.
It seemed to me that the police were willing to give Omar a pass most of the time so long that there wasn’t too many bodies within a certain period of time. The police were perfectly aware of Omar’s robberies but turned a blind eye to them until he turned it into a personal crusade against Avon’s gang. I think I can understand it from their point of view too. Sure, more murders is always bad for the stats, but the rank and file also knows that Omar is hurting the drug dealers in way that the cops can’t, so why not leave him to it, especially since Omar is very diligent about keeping away from innocents who aren’t in the game.
Sure, I’m with you as far as the plot of The Wire goes, but there’s an overreaching impunity regarding murder that just seems wrong to me, outside of even Omar and Mouzone. I’ve always held the assumption that if I shoot someone in broad daylight that I’m 95% going to get caught, that’s the disconnect. Omar toodles to his hideout, Mouzone friggin’ hangs around for a while and then goes to his motel, and apparently nobody says, “It’s the bowtie guy, he’ll be back here tomorrow.”?
Outside of general impunity, the reasoning behind no one coming forward with a positive ID or being willing to testify was exemplified in (IIRC) the first episode, where the witness in a case gets his head caved in for his troubles. There’s a very prevalent “anti-snitch” movement in the street community that is daunting to most police actions.
Have you seen what’s been going on Mexico lately? Somalia? Well, it’s possible to create conditions like that, at least in discrete pockets of space and time in the US.
Take the very poorest, most crime ridden areas of a city. Make that city underfunded, with overburdened courts. Add a probably underfunded/understaffed police department. Put them under political pressure to downplay crime statistics. Make most of the victims people with no political power, no wealth, no voice in the media. Make them minorities in racially segregated/polarized cities. Make most of the victims drug dealers or drug addicts. Have a historical environment where many of the citizens distrust cops (often for very good reason) and many of the cops don’t feel very much respect or duty towards the citizens.
When you have neighborhoods like this, or periods of time like this (the height of first introduction of crack, for example), what you have are essentially mini-failed states. In that environment, getting away literally with murder isn’t so hard.
I agree. And it is shown in the murders that Snoop and Chris Partlow get away with. All they have to do is seal up the vacant lots with a grabber gun and they are good. How many murders do they get away with? More than Jeffrey Dahmer? Maybe. His victims were poor, gay and black too. Let a white, rich, girl go missing and what will happen? What media coverage will they get if found?
This isn’t really accurate. Outside from a few cops, McNulty, Bunk, people in Major crimes and a few homicide guys, Omar is largely invisible. Sure the police know people like him exist, but do they know about Omar little the stick up boy with the scar on his face who’s making people tremble - not at all. It’s more that the crimes his committed are never reported because they generally effect other criminals and those criminals are not usually corpses.
Well, I also interpreted it as the cops “in the know” were happy to let Omar operate, as it helped them in multiple ways. It also meant having an ace up their sleeve when they needed Omar to inform about something truly important - as they could easily find stuff to pin on him, if they made the effort. This made him a very valuable asset to keep around.