Guardian - David Simon - The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US

It seems that in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, jurors are far more reluctant to convict criminal defendants than in the suburban enclaves that ring the city.

The report upset the city's chief prosecutor; she thought its conclusions "politically divisive" and asked the foundation to either amend the draft study or kill it entirely. The press mocked her for this, of course, and rightly so, while on the radio here, white talk-show hosts had fun speculating about why city jurors - read "black people" - won't do their civic duty when it is, in fact, their communities that are so overwhelmed by crime.

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And now, this week, no one asks why men and women from Baltimore, upon being given a chance to strike a blow against disorder and mayhem by convicting those charged criminally, would shirk their responsibility

In order to elect Baltimore's mayor as Maryland's governor, crime had to go down. And when that mayor was unable to do so legitimately, through a meaningful deterrent, his police officials did not merely go about cooking their statistics, making robberies and assaults disappear by corrupting the reporting of such incidents, they resorted to something far more disturbing.

For the last years of his administration, Mayor Martin O'Malley ordered the mass arrests of citizens in every struggling Baltimore neighbourhood, from eastside to west. More than 100,000 bodies were dragged to Central Booking in a single year - record rates of arrest for a city with fewer than 700,000 residents. Corner boys, touts, drug slingers, petty criminals - yes, they went in the wagons.

But school teachers, city workers, shopkeepers, delivery boys - they too were jacked up, cuffed and hauled down to Eager Street - hundreds of them a night on the weekends. Some were charged, but few were prosecuted. And in 25,000 such cases, they were later freed from the detention facility without ever going to court; no charges were proffered because, well, no crime had been committed.

I wasn't arrested. Nor was Ed Burns or Dominic West or Aidan Gillen. Nor were my neighbours or the Baltimore Sun's editors or the members of the Maryland Club. But then, we're all white. Among the black members of my cast and crew, it was often impossible to drive from the film set to home at night without being stopped - and in some cases detained or arrested - on nonexistent probable cause and nonexistent charges. The crackdown came wholly in black neighbourhoods and it landed wholly on the backs of black citizens.

And now, just a few years later, comes this document that causes the state's attorney to deny the obvious and leaves everyone else wondering weakly and vaguely as to the why of it. Is it so hard to understand that the same people who had their civil rights cleanly dispatched, who spent nights in jail because police officers lied on them and dragged them off without charge - that these people might be inclined to disbelieve the word of law enforcement in any future criminal case?

In places like West Baltimore, the drug war destroyed every last thing that the drugs themselves left standing - including the credibility of the police deterrent. To elect one man to higher office, an entire city alienated its citizenry and destroyed its juror pool.