I'm on Season 2 now, and it seems like no matter how good of a detective McNulty proves himself to be, Rawls still refuses to change his mind about him.
shareMcNulty is hard to control and for a guy thats as anal as Rawls that could drive him into insanity.
shareYou did see what he did in the very first episode of the series, didn't you?
shareYes I did, but my point is that he compensated for it later in many ways, yet Rawls still hates him. Maybe Rawls is just a very unforgiving person and holds grudges.
shareHe can't be managed and it's not good for a supervisor to have an employee going off on his own, doing his own thing. Even after everything McNulty did in Season 1, Rawls was willing to let him come back to Homicide with a clean slate...until he went behind everybody's back and went to the U.S. Attorney and try to have the FBI take over the Barksdale investigation.
shareHow far into season two are you?
shareMcNulty is a complete loose cannon. Rawls is the archetypal bureaucratic cop in the show. He wants easy cases to keep his clearance rate up so that he can look good and move up the ladder.
McNulty screws with all this. Rawls will admit that McNulty is a good investigator l, but he's also a loose cannon who runs his own agenda and is disloyal. He causes Rawls a lot of headaches in the first two seasons. In season one, McNulty gets Rawls in trouble with the brass and forces him to send a couple of much needed investigators to deal with this pet project of McNultys. In season two you have this terrible "stone cold whodunit" of a case. There's fourteen dead girls, no ID, foreign nationals, killed on a boat, probably by other foreign nationals. They're never going to solve that case and the sheer number of bodies will screw up their clearance rates. So what does McNulty do? After Rawls takes care of the case so it's not his responsibility, McNulty goes out of his way to make sure that the BPD has to eat that case. After this season, not too many spoilers, Rawls doesn't care about McNulty too much because their career paths take them out of each others orbits.
After this season, not too many spoilers, Rawls doesn't care about McNulty too much because their career paths take them out of each others orbits.
Maybe you haven't cottoned on to the fact that in the Baltimore Police department you have 2 kinds of police. Ones who care about doing real police work and ones who care about climbing the career ladder.
McNulty does real police work (though he's too self righteous for it to not also be about himself and his own ego) and he specifically bucks the chain of command stuff. The problem is that by doing real police work he actually makes it harder for the career climbers to do what they do because in this department gravitational excrement. It always rolls downhill.
This is a theme that repeats itself ad nauseam throughout the show. Doing real police work is pretty hard in a department where all the people in charge of policy are trying to climb the ladder. Of course you've seen that episode by now where Landsman gets Rawls to give Jimmy an out and bring himself back into the fold because he's such good police. Rawls isn't totally blind to this but Rawls is also a self serving career climber and a true believer in chain of command and the way the poopy can roll down that chain onto everyone below keeping him unburdened so that he may continue his rise.
I get the feeling that a long time ago, guys like Rawls and Burrell actually DID care about real police work but when they saw how hamstrung you'd get they figured it was better to just play the game and work on their careers.
There's a clear difference and self-awareness between them (although we don't see it with Burrell until the very end) and guys like Valchek who are clearly just bullies who wanted the Badge for the power they think it'll give them.
Rawls' negativity towards McNulty may also stem from how he recognizes where McNulty is coming from and how he knows it'll just cause problems for everyone due to the system he decided to give up fighting a long time ago.
I get the feeling that a long time ago, guys like Rawls and Burrell actually DID care about real police work but when they saw how hamstrung you'd get they figured it was better to just play the game and work on their careers.
Because he happens to know the man intimately. And he is without a doubt, the most swollen *beep* in the history of law enforcement.
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