The writers didn’t make up the content it’s pretty well documented
The creators and writers of The Wire, particularly David Simon and Ed Burns, drew on their real-world experiences and knowledge of the Baltimore criminal justice system to depict the phenomenon of "juking the stats"
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David Simon, a former police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, spent a year researching a Baltimore homicide detective unit for his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, where he met Ed Burns.
Ed Burns, a former Baltimore police officer and later a public school teacher, provided first-hand insights into police practices and how statistics were manipulated within the department. Their combined experience and research informed the storylines, including those related to the pressure on officers to improve crime numbers, notes Medium explains. This pressure often led to tactics like reclassifying crimes to lower categories or making arrests for minor offenses to create the appearance of crime reduction, according to Medium. The Wire then extended this idea to the school system in later seasons, showcasing how similar pressures led to manipulating standardized test scores.
Beyond their own direct experience, Ed Norris, a controversial figure convicted of corruption and with past ties to law enforcement, also worked as an actor on the show, according to The Hooded Utilitarian.
The show's creators strove for realism, populating the series with characters based on real individuals and casting non-professional actors to portray the "faces and voices of the real city". This focus on authenticity, rooted in their journalistic and police backgrounds, was crucial in portraying the complex and often dysfunctional aspects of the institutions they explored, including the pressure to "juke the stats" within the police department.