After my mother died in the early 2000s, I decided to backpack in Europe for a few weeks to process my loss. A week into my travels, in the wee hours of the morning, I stood on a train platform in Edinburgh, Scotland, on my way to London for a few days. A well-heeled middle-aged white woman stood a few paces from me. I nodded to her, and she nodded back with a weak smile. After a long visual assessment of me, she finally spoke.
“American?”
“Yes, have you been there?” I asked.
“To Washington, yes”
“Cool. I live in Baltimore. It’s not that far from D.C.”
“Oh, ‘The Wire,’” she said.
I nodded at her and returned a strained smile.
Her response was surprising to me. I’ve lived in Baltimore my entire life, and “The Wire” is not the first piece of media that comes to mind when I think of my hometown. Despite having many friends who were working as crew on the show. Despite the fact that my first Baltimore production internship was working on its precursor — “Homicide: Life on the Street.” I largely viewed these two crime procedurals as gritty entertainment.
Yet, a Scottish woman in 2004 could only associate Baltimore with a reductive, sensationalized crime series about murder and the street economy.
Black trauma really does travel.
“Beyond the Wire” is a documentary designed to provide a counternarrative to media depictions of Baltimore City as a hub of violence, despair, and systemic incompetence. It is the second installment of the Baltimore Legacy Project, a docuseries featuring interviews with local organizers, educators, historians, and residents led by S. Rasheem, an independent scholar and social scientist. Its first episode, “Baltimore Still Rising,” premiered in 2025 and captured firsthand accounts of the Baltimore Uprising in 2015. This year’s “Beyond the Wire” sheds light on Baltimore’s grassroots efforts to combat the city’s long history of structural oppression by uplifting the work of the community leaders and organizers rarely featured in media depictions of Baltimore.
I attended a packed screening of the film at the SNF Parkway in late August. The documentary begins with its subjects lamenting the larger impact of “The Wire” on people’s perceptions of the city. Their observations are fairly standard: though good writing from an entertainment perspective, the show itself dealt in distortion with a myopic view that came at a cost. Some interviewees take umbrage with creator, executive producer, head writer, and showrunner David Simon’s decision to carve out fictional characters from actual Baltimore residents like Marlo Stanfield and Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale with no consideration of the effect on these men’s lives. They critique the show’s lack of emphasis on the long-standing grassroots work to elevate solutions to the problems of drugs and violence. A strong case is made that “The Wire” has had a lasting negative influence on how Baltimore City is understood more broadly.
“Peace actually has dominion here, love has dominion here, but the narrative is that violence has dominion here,” said Erricka Bridgeford of the Baltimore Peace Movement.
The introduction felt like a rehash of the critiques many of us Baltimore residents and scholars have been making since the show’s premiere. Countless books and scholarly articles use “The Wire” as a backdrop to understand everything from the impact of the War on Drugs on the carceral system to the structural failures of a majority-Black city. Often, these works have been less than critical of the maker’s intentions. People who love Baltimore know that “The Wire” never told the whole story of the city.
Just as I was beginning to fear that I was in for a 90-minute indictment of David Simon, the film switches gears and launches the story of the real work of moving “Beyond the Wire.”
As a social scientist using documentary film as a research method, I found that some of the most compelling aspects of Rasheem’s film come from her commitment to providing a timeline of systemic and structural policies that have shaped violence and poverty in Baltimore. These historical artifacts are enlivened by voice-over narration and B-roll that puts names, dates, and faces to histories Baltimore residents are often not taught in school (though they should be).
Broken into chapters, the film touches on systemic divestment, gentrification, “boots on the ground” activism, violence interruption initiatives, and the use of credible messengers, or trusted mentors, in their neighborhoods. “Peace actually has dominion here, but the narrative is violence has dominion,” said Erricka Bridgeford of the Baltimore Peace Movement.
To show how the narrative of violence is perpetuated, “Beyond the Wire” highlights the impact of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their flagship news station WBFF Fox 45 regularly frames Baltimore residents and its leaders as dangerous and incompetent. The Sinclair media section elicited the largest call and response I’ve witnessed in a documentary screening in some time — the audience’s grumbling was intense. Along the way, the film takes pains to provide context for Baltimore’s historic drop in homicides — successfully arguing that grassroots community organizations such as We, Our, Us; Baltimore Brothers; Tendea Family; Baltimore Peace Movement; and Challenge 2 Change have been doing the work to curb violence in the city for decades. Community organizers argue that new policies and funding from the mayor’s office have helped to move their existing work along at a faster clip.
As a documentary about Baltimore’s history and the activists shaping the present, “Beyond the Wire” is a masterful effort. As a form of visual storytelling, the documentary is less absorbing. Talking heads can only carry an audience on a journey so far before it feels like a lecture. The interviews could have benefited from more visual elements and better affective use of the soundtrack. I was struck by the end credits, which feature a variety of songs produced by Baltimore artists, and found myself wishing these songs had been incorporated throughout the feature to shape the visual landscape. Art is a central tool for creating a just world. Baltimore was the second city in the U.S. to mandate that 1% of capital construction costs go toward public art. From the Baltimore Mural Program to numerous festivals, arts institutions, and art incubators, art is an integral part of what makes Baltimore such a resilient city. “Beyond the Wire” tacks art on as opposed to integrating it. It was a missed opportunity in an otherwise solid effort.
Additionally, the film primarily focused on the efforts of male advocates. From mothers who have lost their children to the partners of the violence interrupters who worry for the lives of their loved ones, as well as the female activists leading vigils for victims of violence, women and girls play a key role in this city’s efforts to curb violence. However, their perspectives were shoehorned in during the third act.
As “Beyond the Wire” screens throughout the city, each event is paired with a Q&A panel featuring people from the film. The panelists at the SNF Parkway screening brought the fire. Moderated by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle’s Director of Public Policy Dayvon Love, the panel included Producer/Director Rasheem; Vernon Horton of the Mayor’s Office of African-American Male Engagement; Danise Jones-Dorsey, a community land trust advocate; and Diane Bell-McKoy, CEO of Opportunity Connections LLC. Together, the panelists made one thing clear: when you lead with love for Baltimore, the city will love you back. “Beyond the Wire” is not only a counternarrative; it is a love letter that we all should watch.