We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City

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United States v. Police Department of Baltimore City, et. al., Civil No. JBK-17-99, Consent Decree (filed Jan. 12, 2017) If “The Wire” defined the futility of the drug war – and not incidentally ranks as one of the greatest series ever made in the eyes of a loyal few – its fictional look at policing Baltimore merges with a fact-based version in “We Own This City,” a spare but bleak window into a culture of corruption that plagued the city’s police department. What a find!’: Cole Martin, right, in the title role of My Name is Leon. BBC/Douglas Road Productions The series was shot in Baltimore and brings together several alumni of the The Wire, both on screen and behind the camera, including David Simon and George Pelecanos. But unlike that venerated saga, We Own This City is based on the true story told in the journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book of the same name.

Most disturbing, however, was the inaction of prosecutors and defense attorneys. In perhaps the most haunting passage of the book, Fenton describes the immediate aftermath of the arrests of seven of the GTTF former officers. He quotes one prosecutor, who later reflected (and claimed) that defense attorneys, “in almost every case” conveyed that, accordingly to their client, the officer was “dirty.” However, the prosecutor continued, “[u]nless you have something concrete to show me, I have nothing to go off except your guy doesn’t want to be prosecuted.” Fenton then reveals that, This emphasis on numbers and quantity over quality really had a corrosive effect on the police department and influenced the conduct of officers. Once they realized that the rules that supposedly exist didn’t really exist, it’s a slippery slope into saying, ‘Well, I’m dealing with bad guys and they’ve made a lot of money through dealing drugs or whatever. The cast includes Jon Bernthal ( The Walking Dead, Show Me a Hero),Josh Charles ( The Good Wife, In Treatment), Wunmi Mosaku ( Lovecraft Country), and Jamie Hector ( BOSCH, The Wire), among many others. See the full cast here. And, like The Wire, We Own This City doesn't tell a typical TV cop show story. Because, even though the series details how Wayne Jenkins and his task force are exposed, the conditions which allowed their corruption to fester still remain. The unmissable My Name Is Leon, on BBC Two, is a 90-minute adaptation of Kit de Waal’s acclaimed novel. Written by Shola Amoo and directed by Lynette Linton (artistic director at the Bush theatre in London), it stars newcomer Cole Martin as a mixed-race boy in foster care who yearns to be reunited with Jake, his white baby half-brother.Bringing Jenkins and his ilk to justice does not mean Baltimore’s problems are resolved. As of late March, 76 people had been murdered so far this year, up from 65 over the same period in 2021. Another 156 people had been injured in shootings, up from 115 in the corresponding period. The city had also recorded 714 robberies, an increase of almost 25%. The DOJ report came shortly after Gray’s killing sparked an uprising in the city and throughout the U.S. decrying police brutality and racial discrimination. And when the GTTF’s actions were publicized a year later, trust between the BPD and the communities they policed was already severely fractured. You take that and you multiply it by a large number of officers who get captured by that culture and what you get is the gun trace task force.” The guys involved in the task force...they weren't out of the academy when The Wire finished its run [in 2008]," says Simon, himself a former police reporter for The Sun who saw his own books Homicide: Life on the Street and The Corner turned into TV shows interrogating the Baltimore police and drug addiction. Simon’s familiar team (including producers Pelecanos, Nina K. Noble and Ed Burns) is joined by director Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard”), along with several familiar faces from Simon’s past projects in the cast.

Fenton is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and was on this beat. He does a good job of setting the scene at the BPD, primarily following Wayne Jenkins, who does seem to have been the driving force behind the operatic excesses of the GTTF; he also does something David Simon would have benefitted from doing, which is follow and profile some of the Task Force victims, and elaborate on their situations. A remarkable story about the real-life collision of corruption, criminality, and racial profiling. Justin Fenton tells a well-written, wrenching narrative about a dark chapter in not only Baltimore’s history but in the legacy of disconnect between American citizens and those who are sworn to protect and serve them. This book is a must-read.” —Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore and Five Days The author here imparts valuable lessons, the most important of which is that police abuse, brutality, cruelty, and criminality do not – and cannot – persist in a vacuum. It takes systems to victimize perpetually. The systems that were supposedly in place to root out, contain, and stop the GTTF’s criminal and unconstitutional policing at the outset did nothing but look the other way or otherwise cheer on the aggressive, barrel-chested policing tactics that were the GTTF’s hallmarks. As one last example, Fenton relates an instance when a judge ruled that Wayne Jenkins and his squad did not have a legally sufficient reason to stop a person they arrested for supposedly tossing a gun. After suppressing the gun and dismissing the case, the judge actually praised Jenkins and his squad for their work. So much for the fourth amendment’s exclusionary rule serving as a deterrent to unconstitutional policing. How could this happen? Well, the higher-ups were very pleased with the results GTTF got, tons of illegal guns taken off the streets, plenty of arrests, quantities of drugs that would never make it to market. It was probably pretty easy to look at the WHAT without ever considering the HOW. Plus, put people in positions of power and they'll do bad stuff; it has been ever thus. It's probably also pretty easy not to seek out bad behavior, as long as it doesn't come to the attention of anybody who might be able to do anything about it. Justin Fenton, a crime and courts reporter with the Baltimore Sun, meticulously lays out these harrowing details and much more in his gripping, must-read book, We Own this City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption. Fenton brings to this book years of experience reporting on police accountability in Baltimore. He has provided in-depth reporting on the BPD, including its interactions and relationships with hard-pressed communities in Baltimore.

How the GTTF terrorized the city of Baltimore

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. But don't get me wrong; that wasn't always bad. At least two men were justly released -- imprisoned after their arrest on fraudulent drug charges led to tragedy for a Baltimore family, they had spent years in federal prisons before the GTTF's fall resulted in a review of their convictions. That's just one example of justice finally being done; sadly, lives and livelihoods were ruined and families broken and careers ended because of people who were supposed to get criminals off the streets just straight-up BEING criminals on the streets. In the academy, they teach you constitutional policing...then as soon as they go out, [a superior says] 'Everything you just learned is b***s***, this is Baltimore,'" Pelecanos says. "We talked to police who told us that's exactly what happened to them. They were told to throw out everything they had learned that was correct...It's kind of a tragedy." Jenkins and his cohorts were arrested, some flipped trying to save themselves. All went to Jail, Jenkins for 25 years. More police were found to have been doing the same things, although not to Jenkins' scale. One commits suicide. Fenton reports on their stories too as well as the drama of the investigation and trial. He quotes a police authority who notes that these police had to learn their ways from former police. But there are honest cops on the Baltimore police force and that comes out too. It is hard to know just how widespread the corruption is in the department. Regular cops would not have had the freedom that Jenkins’ special plain clothes unit had to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted.

The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore, especially communities of colour. The police department is now under federal oversight but the decades-old spectre of corruption lingers. In the case of [the detective] Maurice Ward, he said it was an accident: he didn’t turn in drugs and he realised that nobody asked him about it and then he sees other people around him skimming money and it’s like, ‘Wow, we can do this and nothing’s going to happen.’ And it just escalates from there.”

Seasons

Over the years, as I describe in the book, it lost that focus and was just another unit of plainclothes officers running around the city. They didn’t trot these guys out for press conferences. It wasn’t that we heard about them all the time. They were working in the shadows, and deployed by the police department as another tool to roam the streets looking for guns.” United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department, Aug. 10, 2016 Full disclosure: As the author of a piece for The BBC analyzing why critics chose The Wire as the best show of the 21st century so far, I am arguably one of those fans.)