The conversation Bodie and Poot have about HIV/AIDS transmission is taken almost verbatim from the non-fiction book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.
The punchline of the joke heard from Sergeant Landsman "...you didn't really come here to hunt, did you?" is a fairly 'crude' joke often called 'The Huntsman and the Bear', and the punchline (but never the full joke) is also heard from the character 'Lewis' in another David Simon series, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993).
The title refers to the pagers used by the Barksdale organization and cloned by the police detail.