In that moment, I cannot just stand there watching myself roll out to sea. I’ve got some HBO butt to kick. And then it hits me. Try to remember something — just one little thing — redeeming about a cop. C’mon now, I used to call them whenever I thought Mama’s life was in danger. There must’ve been something about them that made me keep calling. All I can remember is a sweaty officer in a short-sleeve uniform, standing in the door of my childhood apartment, refusing to look at me.

“ROLLING!!!”

I first came to Baltimore 14 years ago for the job on “The Wire,” a cable drama about cops and crime.

I lived and worked in the city for almost a decade. It is where I became a first-time home buyer, where I sent my daughter to public school, where I discovered that I had the soul of an activist. It’s the place where I drained my bank account to the tune of almost $200,000 to start a nonprofit organization that served formerly incarcerated youth from 2009-2014. We called it “ReWired for Change,” and the goal was simple: We wanted to give young people who had been incarcerated a realistic chance of getting their lives back on track.

For all the time I was there, I twisted my brain to not only do my part, but to also try to figure out why the underserved citizens of Baltimore seemed so apathetic. It took five years of working in those communities for me to learn what I had sensed to be true — what working on “The Wire” should have taught me — that there was a hopelessness on the streets of Baltimore that ran so deep that it seemed to have killed the spirit of the people.

Hopelessness is not something that simply pops up out of nowhere. It has a source. It is never meaningless, and it is never created within a vacuum. I remember seeing it on the faces of the young people I worked with, who traveled by bus across the city, some with kids in tow, to do exactly as we had been instructing them — stay out of trouble by attending G.E.D. classes, look for employment and participate three evenings a week in our anti-recidivism program — only to come up empty-handed every time they applied for the few jobs available to them.

One girl told me the first week of class that she had just lost a friend in a drive-by shooting and had participated in a retaliatory attack. Over the course of four years, I watched her quit rolling with her old crew, earn her G.E.D., graduate from community college and sign up for the National Guard. She still can’t find a steady job.

There is, without question in my mind, a genealogy to the anger that has been on display since Freddie Gray was killed. It’s rooted in a history that is dominated by years of voting for inept and disrespectful politicians. Campaign promises for better schools and more employment opportunities, often made at church services and community meetings during election time, never quite seemed to materialize once the politicians took office.