At a minimum, the criminals of The Wire force us to reconsider the criminal not as an abstraction, but as something concrete, complicated, living, human. We have to face the criminal as a face. Facing the criminal can certainly be terrifying, but in facing the criminal, we face our own face. The criminal is not wholly Other—the criminal is Us. If we do not look at the criminal, it is impossible to ever truly look at our own self, at our own world.