Ed Burns is the former Baltimore city homicide detective, who was one of David Simon’s sources when he wrote the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. Now, they write the HBO television show “The Wire” together.

They met in 1985, when Simon was covering the criminal career of Melvin Williams, and Burns was the lead detective investigating him. Burns had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Baltimore drug trade, a conviction that he was right about most things, and an autodidact’s intellectualism. When Simon first arranged to meet Burns, at a public library, he discovered him with a stack of books, including John Fowles’s “The Magus” and a volume by Hannah Arendt.

Burns is the show’s policy visionary—the one who, Simon half joked, “is only working in TV till somebody realizes that they ought to give him all the money to fix our social problems.”

Someone should give the man money. The show is profound in its true understanding of the social problems of the inner city. Ed Burns is a person who knows so much about the problem, who has lived it. If he has a vision to fix it, I want to know what it is.