The Wire’s Howard “Bunny” Colvin represents the force for positive community change – like very few others in this ecosystem, he tries to “F with the program” to fix what’s clearly not working. But the response from all around him in this system of crime, punishment, and status quo is pretty much to slap that impulse of improvement down. So what can we learn from Bunny and his dogged drive to make things better – is it even worth it, or possible?
The Tragedy of Hamsterdam
Bunny Colvin is one of the “best” characters in The Wire – best in the sense of being a truly good person, guided by moral values, who got into being a cop because he wanted to make the community better. And in The Wire’s Season 3 with his “Hamsterdam” experiment where he effectively legalizes drugs in a small area by not enforcing the laws there – as well as in his works in Edward J Tilghman Middle School in Season 4 – it’s striking that Colvin uses logic to change up the formula. He’s trying to call on our brains to do some good. He observes the truth, tells the truth, and attempts to act in response to the truth. Of course, all this would sound like a good thing you might expect people to value. But it’s not so, at all. No one can ever understand what Colvin is up to, and rarely is Colvin’s truth appreciated.
Hamsterdam ends up becoming a tragedy of being ahead of one’s time – of finding the answer maybe not the right answer, but the best possible answer to a very messed-up situation that won’t go away but living in a world that’s too broken to listen. It’s a tragedy of knowing what could be done to help and having your arms cut off when you go to act.
The political fallout to Hamsterdam is so very sad – because the people who know, know that Bunny was right. Even if his way has some ugliness and imperfections, it does some harm mitigation, whereas the alternative being implemented here just arresting low-level offenders and making their lives even harder is mostly making things worse for almost everyone.
When Carcetti visits Hamsterdam, it’s a key moment of testing whether when given the chance he means to follow through on any of the principles he’s running on: and his choice to sacrifice the Hamsterdam project for his ambitions reveals to us the soulless hack Carcetti really is. Everything we see from him afterwards – him abandoning his “new day” to just “shine up more shit and call it gold,” and making choices that negatively impact his city in exchange for helping him run for Governor a mere two years after becoming mayor – is all foretold to us in Carcetti’s response to Hamsterdam. Privately he believes it’s right, but he helps destroy it for self-gain.
Colvin, meanwhile, is wired the opposite way. When we meet him he’s talking about how he can pull off his Hamsterdam experiment because he’s got his 30 - he’s untouchable. But his decisions continue to prove that he’s not, in fact, doing this because he’s immune. He’s doing it because it’s what he believes is right. And he can’t help himself from continuing to make decisions based on his moral compass over his self-interest: falling on his sword so his junior officers aren’t punished, losing his cushy pension and Hopkins security job as a result, losing his next security job because he can’t accept letting a rich man go uncharged for beating a woman, and so on.
And even though he believes that Hamsterdam disillusioned him, he stills goes on to take a poorly paid job with an academic study in the Middle School attempting, yet again, to help make things better – this time taking an interest in kids with behavioral challenges, most of whom are being groomed for the corner – even though all signs point to this being an uphill battle in every way.
The morality of a person’s choices - as Kant would tell us and the Wire seems to agree - consists in the rightness of the choice itself, not in the outcome of that choice. So when Carcetti continues to put the importance of self-gain first, that’s who he becomes or really shows that he’s been all along. Conversely, Bunny cannot do the right thing for others, even though it repeatedly costs him.
And how does the system reward each character? Carcetti rises in status and power, while Bunny loses what’s been promised to him. Still, who has really lost more, on the deepest level?
The contrast tells us something important about these corrupt systems that continue to fail our society: that individuals generally benefit by falling in line and perpetuating the status quo – no matter how broken and messed up it is – and then leveraging their compliance for self-enrichment. And individuals generally suffer as a result of standing up against that same-old-same-old or trying to make any meaningful change. Put another simple way – at the risk of sounding obvious – in The Wire we see time and time again that immoral behavior is rewarded, and good deeds are punished. It’s not like you’re going to just be able to do the right thing AND reap social rewards like money and status. Nope – in this world which is a pretty good reflection of our real one, it’s pretty much that doing the right thing costs you your ambitions for that stuff. And that really sucks –but at the same time, how much is a moral act really worth, if it doesn’t cost us something?
In a key scene between Bunny and Ellis Carver, Colvin talks to his protegee about what police used to be in his day. He outlines a vision of police as being a crucial part of the community, rather than the enemy of citizens. And it’s the heart of what’s so wrong with a lot of the bad policing we see in the show, and the dynamic that’s developed in so many places between the police and the community.
Police as Community
When Bunny visits former Avon Barksdale soldier Wee-Bay in jail, he speaks constantly in “we’s”. This police officer is strikingly more comfortable talking to a drug soldier than he is at the mayor’s office. So even though we think of police as the establishment, as against the criminals, the way Bunny came up, his view of policing was that he was more a part of Weebay’s community, more so than fancy Carcetti’s. He was there to serve. And this is why it matters to him to be a help to the community, not leading an army at war with the citizens of his city.
And though so much of what we follow in The Wire leads to disillusion and disappointment, promisingly, we watch Carver who begins as Herc’s buddy just relishing flashy, pointless raids flourish into a next-generation version of Colvin in Season 4. He knows all the names of the kids on the corner, tries at every turn to help them rather than ruin their lives, and looks at the situation with humanity and nuance. When he does make the mistake of entrusting Randy’s safety to Herc, and Randy suffers for that, this crushes Carver whereas Herc – who’s ultimately heading down the path of following corrupt defense lawyer Maury Levy – barely even notices.
At the end of Season 5, Carver is shown becoming the new Cedric Daniels as he rises up in rank like his former boss, while bringing an understanding of the importance of more high-level, coordinated police investigations. But Daniels himself also increasingly over time becomes like Colvin – who himself rose to the high rank of Major. Both were about promotions until they lost faith in the system and tried to change it. So we can see Carver following the Daniels and Colvin path. Over time, Carver realizes the limits of his ability to help, like when he’s not able to adopt Randy or fix that mistake, just as Prez does in his role as a teacher, and as Bunny has repeatedly learned. But at least there are some future police officers carrying on Bunny’s vision of police as community helpers and trying to be on the side of the people.
Bunny may lose on Hamsterdam, and he may lose his cushy retirement, but he becomes a surrogate father to one boy, Weebay’s son Namond, who manages to escape the tragedy of his situation. The young boys we meet in Season Four – the “Boys of Summer” the first episode of the season is named after – are all kind of amazing when we first get to know them. But by the end, as each is groomed by the system to go down one of the available toxic paths, Namond is the only one who doesn’t fall into one of those expected roles – and that’s thanks to Bunny. So while almost all of the time he’s spent attempting to fuck with the program and make positive institutional change may fall short, the consolation is at least there’s one life that he has saved from that system, one young person he has shaped for the better. More concretely, Namond escaping the corners by living with Bunny and getting a family to hold him to task is really a chance to live. Because without this, he was probably going to be dead pretty soon.
A Father Figure to Namond - Making an Impact Even for One Person
It’s interesting that Colvin ends up with Namond specifically because, while they seem very different at first, subtly, we can see that he identifies with Namond in certain ways. When Namond comes to dinner with his wife, he calls the boy an Eddie Haskell – a reference to the character from Leave It to Beaver who’s known for trying to cover up being up to no good by putting on a flattering, sucking-up personality with parents. Namond, when he’s relaxed, is also very charismatic and charming, whereas when he feels out of his comfort zone he becomes confrontational, trying to act tough and mimic what he’s been taught about how to be like his dad. Yet, in reality, Namond feels out of place in Weebay’s world. Everyone from that world keeps lamenting that Namond is weak or soft, but Bunny can see how Namond’s unsuitability for the corner is not objectively a bad thing – in fact, it means he’s better suited for an environment that will hopefully keep him alive. Still – until he gains Bunny’s faith and the new class from the academic grant – it’s hard to imagine that Namond will be able to get the opportunity, or even more crucially find the confidence, to see himself as able to function in a different environment.
Colvin himself actually has the same problem – in his conversation with Weebay, he reveals that he mentally groups himself in with the Barksdale soldier, even though Weebay is a criminal and he’s a cop. When he goes to City Hall to meet with the mayor’s staff, he’s bumbling, visibly uncomfortable, always saying something awkward. In Season 3 during Hamsterdam he’s totally ill-equipped for the politics coming for him, and later when he gets into the security field he’s just wrong for it because he doesn’t have the instinct to suck up to the rich and powerful and keep quiet. In other words, Bunny feels similarly to Namond that he can only be himself in certain contexts, and embedded with that is a lack of self-confidence in environments that he doesn’t feel polished enough for. In fathering Namond, then, he’s trying to give the boy what he feels he didn’t have – and in the end, when we see Namond thriving in debate club, it’s implied that the kid is getting the right instruction in how to bring out his gifts in more formal educational contexts.
While Namond’s ending is a bright spot, ultimately it’s a disappointment that Colvin, who tried to make institutional change, was shut down and punished for it. And the trends we see over time are not improvements but, largely, things getting worse.
Even though Bunny’s able to help Namond, he and Carver and Prez can’t help Randy or Duquan or Bodie, or Michael. The end of Season 4 leaves us with a palpable frustration that hopefully makes us want to fix this broken world, yet the show is also not really that hopeful that we will or can. Bunny himself has understood by this point that things don’t change, at least not for the better. Yet there are meaningful exceptions. Besides Namond getting a chance to live, there’s Cutty making a life out of the game and making a positive impact in young people’s lives; Prez getting control of his class and actually teaching them math; and Bubbles overcoming incredible pain and addiction to get clean and share his story with others. All those people needed help to get there. If Bunny Colvin teaches us anything, it’s that – however big or small the result may be of your impact – you still have to go ahead and try. When you look around you at all that’s not working, how can you not give it a shot and fuck with the program?
Sources Cited
“8 Great Eddie Haskell Moments from Leave It to Beaver - Season 1.” YouTube, YouTube, 21 Mar. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VImHELd4tLY.
Johnson, Robert, and Adam Cureton. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 21 Jan. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/.