There are rules that pundits should follow when discussing the riots in Baltimore. Among them are (or should be): don’t politicize the violence and don’t view everything through the prism of The Wire.

The first has already been broken by just about everyone on social media who quickly discovered that, much to their relief, the riots affirmed every single one of their existing political opinions. Thank goodness for that, huh, guys?! The second is an acknowledgment that comprehending a complex city like Baltimore through the narrative of an HBO show simply can’t do it justice.

Fair warning: this post doesn’t break those rules, but it does skirt them.

Yesterday Rare’s Kevin Boyd interviewed former Maryland Republican delegate Michael Smigiel. Smigiel had authored a Facebook post that took a rhetorical ax to former Baltimore mayor and current prospective Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley over his stewardship of the Baltimore Police Department during the aughts.

Smigiel said that O’Malley adopted a policy of zero-tolerance policing that locked up Baltimore residents for infractions as trivial as drinking beer on a front porch. This allowed O’Malley to rig the statistics, making it look like arrests were up and crime was down while he puffed across the statewide stage as a law-and-order Democrat.

“O’Malley set a quota to get guns and people off the street,” Smigiel said. “The more he arrested, the more he said he was pro-law enforcement.

As O’Malley’s former city fell into chaos this week, his record fell under scrutiny—and not just from Republicans like Smigiel. He was roundly heckled when he returned to West Baltimore on Tuesday to observe the wreckage of a scorched CVS. And while he boasts about having achieved “the biggest reduction in Part 1 crime in any major city in America” during his mayorship, the Washington Post notes that the entire country saw a sharp plummet in crime during the 2000s. When O’Malley left office, Baltimore still had the second highest homicide rate of any major American city.

Still, the Post held its fire and its fact-checking elves demerited O’Malley only one Pinocchio for his statement. David Simon, the former Baltimore journalist and creator of “The Wire,” wasn’t so charitable. This is a direct quote that Simon gave The Marshall Project:

The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley. He destroyed police work in some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he found a way to pull them apart. …But to be honest, what happened under his watch as Baltimore’s mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high and with his promises of a reduced crime rate on the line, he put no faith in real policing.

Simon gives O’Malley fleeting credit for initial police reforms that occurred after the new commissioner Ed Norris was brought in. But eventually O’Malley’s ambition overrode his idealism. His sights were set on statewide office and that meant the decline in the crime rate needed to be expedited. Simon continues:

O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper. How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.

That’s a savage indictment of a politician whose ambitions are now engirdling the presidency, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans of Simon’s work. Tommy Carcetti, Baltimore’s fresh-faced idealist-in-a-hurry mayor on “The Wire” who discovers he can get elected governor if he “jukes the stats,” is based in part on O’Malley. It’s a withering and thorough parody, far more harmful than any of the gum-tongued dummy portrayals of George W. Bush, and it’s sparked serious speculation over whether Tommy Carcetti could hurt Martin O’Malley in 2016.

Some writers have bashed Simon in the wake of the riots, charging that he’s lost touch with West Baltimore since The Wire wrapped up. But dismiss him at your own peril. Simon is for inner-city Baltimore what Émile Zola was to French miners: a journalist who can catalogue exhaustive details while simultaneously never loosening his broader grasp on human nature. If anyone understands O’Malley’s tenure great and small, it’s him.

And any illusion that tenure pacified Charm City went up in Monday’s smoke. Let’s not delude ourselves: Baltimore experienced searing crime and violence long before the 2000s and Monday’s unrest was nothing new. But it says something that a liberal writer like Simon—”if [O’Malley’s] the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him”—a centrist newspaper like the Washington Post, and a Republican delegate like Smigiel are all slapping huge asterisks next to O’Malley’s record.

Could there be a President Carcetti? After Larry Hogan won Maryland’s governorship, it seemed unlikely. After Monday, it seems nearly impossible.