Isn't the morally ambiguous protagonist the American TV/movie trope?
I think The Wire is a bit better than that, though: the moral ambiguity in The Wire seldom boils down to justifying the means: plenty of characters are just bad in an individual capacity while doing good in their professional capacity, or vice versa.
The Omar character is probably the most straightforward in terms of the trope, but even he does not act for the sake of the ends: he does it because it's all he knows.