Two titans of Baltimore storytelling, “The Wire” creator David Simon and “This American Life” host Ira Glass, met on stage Tuesday night for a discussion hosted by The Banner and its media partner WYPR.

In front of a full auditorium at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the two talked about Baltimore, putting together a weekly radio show and more at “The Art of the Story” event.

What to make of Baltimore’s declining crime

An audience member, toward the end of the event, asked Simon what he thought of alternative approaches to policing.

Simon called it an “interesting” question for Baltimore right now.

He pointed out that “the murder rate and the crime rate is down in the last two years, without the National Guard," and said he wasn’t sure anyone really had the answer to why crime in Baltimore had dropped.

Mayor Brandon Scott has been championing “alternative programs,” Simon said, like violence interruption. He said that’s probably done no harm and “probably done some good,” but said it was hard to measure and “non-empirical.”

Simon did credit “good, old-fashioned police work” out of the State’s Attorney’s Office, saying Ivan Bates had greatly increased prosecutions for gun crimes and other offenses.

Data from the State’s Attorney’s Office backs that up. According to a budget presentation from June, the number of people incarcerated after being convicted for using a firearm in Baltimore increased from 781 in 2021-2022 to 2,129 in 2023-2024.

That same budget presentation shows cases sent to federal court from Baltimore increased from 98 in 2021-2022 to 135 in 2023-2024. Bates was sworn in as state’s attorney at the beginning of 2023.

“I wouldn’t want to say no to either right now,” Simon said. “Both those things are mission-critical, and certainly what Bates is doing is mission-critical.”

A ‘This American Life’ preview

This week’s episode of “This American Life” comes with an “incredible scoop,” Glass said.

The episode is built off interviews with more than a dozen immigration judges, including some who used their real names and spoke on the record for recorded interviews, Glass said.

Judges rarely speak to reporters. But because of the way the Trump administration has “radically” changed immigration enforcement, some were willing to speak, Glass said.

Audience members also got an inside tidbit on how the weekly radio show and podcast are produced. Regular listeners will know they often end the show with a quote jokingly attributed to Torey Malatia, the program’s co-founder.

The quote from Malatia is lifted out of context from the episode. Glass revealed that the show’s producers have a dedicated Slack channel where staff on the show nominate snippets of audio to close the show with.

“Some of them are so dirty, that I would think, ‘Oh, we can’t broadcast this in the United States of America,” Glass said.

Keeping things from getting too dark

It’s no secret that large swaths of the public feel fatigued from the news. Glass said that plays a role in how the team behind “This American Life” produces an episode.

As an example, he said there are times the team will try to “conceal” at the beginning of the show if the episode is about a topic such as Gaza, “or if it’s going to be kind of heavy.”

“Everybody’s ready to be like, ‘OK, I got it, forget it,’” Glass said, “Because everyone knows where they stand.”

Simon said he approaches things similarly. If he’s working on a television show and there’s a “really dark” episode or subject matter, they make sure to balance it.

As a show runner, Simon makes sure “the funny ones are funny.” If an episode is going to break someone’s heart at its climax or conclusion, Simon said, you “need something funny in the first 10 minutes.”