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My first encounter with the city of Baltimore was through David Simon’s HBO series, The Wire. I knew nothing about the city until the series aired in 2002, but its opening scene set the tone for five seasons of grappling with the hard truths in a struggling great American city. Detective Jimmy McNulty arrives at the location of a dice game turned homicide. Interviewing a witness, he learns that the victim, Omar Isaiah “Snot Boogie” Betts, habitually participated in — then robbed — the weekly dice game. McNulty wonders why, if everyone knew he would rob the game, they let him play at all. The witness responds, “Got to. This America, man.”
