William Rawls, played by John Doman and starring in all five seasons of the show, is a consistently high-ranking member of the Baltimore Police Department. Over the course of The Wire, Rawls ascends through the higher echelons of the Department, eventually reaching the rank of Deputy Commissioner of Operations and, at the end of Season 5, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police. This career pre-occupation is often detrimental to both effective law enforcement and those under his command as seen, for example, in his repeated attempts to renegotiate his responsibility for case-work and mistakes as commanding officer of Homicide, or his weekly passage of blame at ComStat meetings. Such circumventions of responsibility is aided by his obstinance and crude wit, typically down-speaking and