The Wire (TV Series)

All Due Respect (2004)

Robert Wisdom: Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin

Quotes 

• Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : You know what I was thinking? That tonight's a good night. Why? Because my shot cop didn't die. Then it hit me. This is what makes a good night on my watch. Absence of a negative.

• [at roll call the morning after Dozerman was shot] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : Be seated. Regarding Officer Dozerman, his condition has been upgraded to "guarded." I'm told he can receive visits, and he's been moved to recovery unit. As of this tour, all hand-to-hand undercover buys of CDS... are suspended in the Western District.

  [the officers mutter angrily; Colvin pulls out a small paper bag with something in it, and sets it on his podium] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : Somewheres, back in the dawn of time, this district had itself a civic dilemma of epic proportion. The city council had just passed a law that forbid alcoholic consumption in public places. On the streets, and on the corners. But the corner is, and it was, and it always will be, the poor man's lounge. It's where a man wants to be on a hot summer's night. It's cheaper than a bar, catch a nice breeze, you watch the girls go by. But... the law is the law. And the Western cops rollin' by, what were they gonna do? If they arrested every dude out there for tippin' back a High Life, there'd be no other time for any other kind of police work. And if they looked the other way, they'd open themselves to all kinds of flaunting, all kind of disrespect.

  [he opens the paper bag and pulls out a bottle of beer] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : Now this was before my time when it happened, but somewhere back in the '50s or '60s, there was a small moment of... goddamn genius by some nameless smokehound who comes out the cut-rate one day, and on his way to the corner, he slips that just-bought pint of elderberry...

  [he drops the beer back into the bag] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : ... into a paper bag. A great moment of civic compromise. That small, wrinkled-ass paper bag allowed the corner boys to have their drink in peace, and it gave us permission *to go and do police work*. The kind of police work that's actually worth the effort. That's worth actually taking a bullet for. Dozerman... he got shot last night tryin' to buy three vials. Three!

  [he holds up the vials, scoffs, shakes his head, then pulls the beer back out of the bag] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : There's never been a paper bag... for drugs.

  [he drops the vials into the bag, one by one] 

  Maj. Howard 'Bunny' Colvin : Until now.