We Own This City

It begins Monday and dramatizes the book of the same name which chronicles abuses by Baltimore's police department. Executive producers George Pelecanos and ...

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The easy move in discussing We Own This City is to compare it to co-creators David Simon and George Pelecanos' The Wire. After all, they both concern crime, ...

Every aspect, from the writing to the acting to Green’s direction, work in concert. There isn’t a wrong step in any of the acting. The technique makes clear the sense that corruption has reigned over this area for so long. Within episodes, the story jumps from the show’s present to 2 years earlier to a decade earlier, and back. Adapted a book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, the series covers nearly two decades of Baltimore Police corruption through the activities of the GTTF. What passes for uplift is one character, on the day they quit, telling their successor, “It’s your turn now”. It tells the viewers the fight goes on, but it doesn’t exactly qualify as inspirational. That objective perspective might make We Own This City too difficult for some to watch. The petty arrests, the violence, the wielding of power unchecked, the sense of entitlement unquestioned. The literal mugging of citizens for 20 or 30 dollars. It’s a matter of fact. However, many might not be prepared for the sucker punch of less headline-grabbing corruption. Over the past several years Americans have become increasingly aware of some of the damning activities of police forces.

The series was created by creators of “The Wire” and “The Deuce,” David Simon and George Pelecanos. The cast includes Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles, Wunmi Mosaku ...

“We Own This City” premieres on HBO Max on Monday, April 25. According to HBO, the series acknowledges the “moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.” The series was created by creators of “The Wire” and “The Deuce,” David Simon and George Pelecanos. The cast includes Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles, Wunmi Mosaku and Jamie Hector. The premise of “We Own This City” is based on a book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton.

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 ...

Yet in terms of bringing a sharp dramatic eye to big-city policing, Simon and company pretty much own this genre. And I did nothing but lose in my time." "It was lost when I got there.

The Wire's David Simon returns to Baltimore for his new series about a dirty police unit who ruled the city like a gang of thieves. But it's a different ...

The drama can feel a little mechanical at times, likely because it closely hews to the facts of the real-life case, and the storyline involving Suiter in particular sometimes scans as a too-symbolic contrast to the GTTF story, as if to clumsily underscore the fact that there are actually good cops around. Few other writers craft television narratives like this, whose appropriately downbeat worldview accurately reflects the fact that , despite the sheer amount of people trying to do the right thing, there's a lot of money in ensuring that systemic failure flourishes. A police officer might make a solid middle-class salary, but if you're surrounded by piles of drug money that total an amount you might never see in a lifetime, it's easy to justify skimming a little off the top. They track Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), a Department of Justice lawyer in the Civil Rights Division examining the Baltimore Police Department in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015 and subsequent protests. This narrative structure also potently highlights how this pattern of corruption stems from understandable economic motivations, with the time jumps illustrating the slow normalisation of fraud and theft as an integral part of the job. They wrongfully searched civilians and stole money from them, planted drugs and guns, and generally acted with brutal impunity, all with the protection of a badge.

Jon Bernthal is the only good thing about HBO's We Own This City, which isn't a good thing. The show from Wire creators premieres on HBO Max on April 25.

With its pressing social issues and weighty mystery, We Own This City desperately wants to be The Wire and True Detective, but lacks the narrative panache to match the unbelievable twists and turns of the headlines the story is ripped from. The timeline is confusing and difficult to keep up with, and none of the other characters are memorable. Each offers a different piece in the puzzle of Jenkins. In a show consumed with putting the system on trial, none of the actors are allowed the range to stand out. One of the few characters with any personal life beyond the force is newly minted Detective Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector) who’s investigating a murder of a young Black man in an alley. The first begins in 2015, with Detectives McDougall (David Corenswet) and Kilpatrick (Larry Mitchell) scoping a drug dealer. We Own This City is a ruminative show with a multitude of moving parts — too many, in fact.

Based on the non-fiction book of the same name, HBO's new series from David Simon and George Pelecanos has a lot in common with the Baltimore-set crime ...

But although We Own This City is addictive and sure to be devoured by fans of The Wire, it does suffer from two nagging issues. When he’s not hanging out with Bunk and McNulty, you can find him hiking in the mountains of Colorado. You can follow him on Twitter @terryterrones. That message is integral to both series, but because the events of We Own This City are based in fact and not fiction, its impact is felt with much more force. The settings, cinematography, music, and rapid-fire dialogue in We Own This City are all reminiscent of The Wire. Even the cast is loaded with veterans from the series. Bernthal is electric, and whenever he’s onscreen, the series is elevated. Of course, when you hear the words “law enforcement” and “Baltimore” together, the TV show The Wire quickly springs to mind—and for good reason.

We Own This City, an HBO Max miniseries out April 25, about a Baltimore Police Department (BPD) task force unit that went rogue, highlights some of the ...

This includes a Philadelphia police officer, Eric Snell, who had previously been a part of the BPD and had ties to the GTTF. As depicted in the series, six of eight GTTF members—Thomas Allers, Wayne Jenkins, Momodu Gondo, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, and Maurice Ward—pleaded guilty to a number of charges and were convicted. “The aftershocks of the GTTF scandal continue to be felt to this day. Some was known by the police department and the department was incapable of taking care of its own business,” said Michael Bromwich, who led the independent investigation. Officers not directly associated with the GTTF have been charged and convicted in connection with events that occurred more than a decade ago,” the report says. The scandal broke at a time of struggle and high tensions between Baltimore community members and the police department. 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. In one instance, revealed in court, officers took someone’s house keys, found out where that person lived and stole $100,000 from a safe in the house. Amid protests following the killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, one GTTF officer allegedly prevented looting that was happening at a pharmacy. The extent of the GTTF’s reign of terror on the city of Baltimore became more widely known in 2017, when eight members of the unit were indicted on charges of extortion, robbery, racketeering, and overtime fraud. They would see who ran out of the group, chase them, and detain them. The wide array of crimes the GTTF’s officers engaged in is staggering.

A review of 'We Own This City,' the new series from 'The Wire' creator David Simon and author George Pelecanos, starring Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles, ...

Just as Simon did in The Wire, he eventually traces the start of the brokenness back to the war on drugs. In the end, the series suggests it will take multiple generations to solve the issues with policing in this country, if they can be solved at all. At the center of We Own This City is Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) whose rise from rookie officer to amoral head of the Gun Trace Task Force is tracked via flashbacks to past incidents. We Own This City isn’t a sequel to The Wire, but it certainly feels like a complement, one that quickly encourages us to be suspicious of every cop we encounter rather than warm to them despite their flaws. Because of that structure, We Own This City is an extremely procedural procedural. While the previous series showed us both good police officers and ones who did not always act in the best interests of the public, the new show is explicitly an indictment of policing gone all the way off the rails.

“Can't fuck with Superman.” So says Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), on his way into a Baltimore Police Department building for what he believes will be a ...

You can get a ton of dramatic mileage out of “oops, we stumbled into a much bigger case than we thought” on a cop show, and so far We Own This City is all about “a much bigger case than we thought.” How big, and how far the show is willing to go to prosecute it, is an open question. Starting with The Wire, Simon opened a lot of eyes to the rank brutality, corruption, and racism of the War on Drugs, and for that he is to be commended. That look alone is enough to send the police commissioner (Delaney Williams) out of the room with a single, disgusted word: “Fuck.” There’s the rub, with the show and with Simon’s work as a whole. Look in his eyes as he sits in that interrogation room—“black eyes, like a doll’s eyes,” as Quint from Jaws would put it—and you’ll see nothing, nothing but deadly rage. They deal with a political establishment that has essentially thrown in the towel, a police force that refuses to do its nominal job now that it’s under scrutiny, and hyper-abusive cops like the infamous Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), who has the proverbial long-as-your-arm rap sheet but is still on the streets. Jon Bernthal is the star of the show, by every metric that the word “star” implies. (He bashes some poor guy’s head in over nothing at all in one of the episode’s more disturbing scenes, though another in which he humiliates a man in front of his kid for no reason is equally upsetting in its own way.) Can they achieve anything against those odds, with the threat of a Trump administration looming? Their only lead is a second tracking device Hawk discovers beneath the suspect’s car, one loaned out to a member of the Task Force. Rather than return it, McDougall opts to hang on to it, just in case. In one key sequence, he helps other cops raid a low-level dealer’s apartment, cleaning it out and pocketing the profits in cahoots with the guy’s former supplier. We Own This City Episode 1 opens with a sequence that cuts between his time as a beat cop, showing him effortlessly smashing a man’s bottle of booze just because he can, and his time as the head of a high-profile, high-powered BPD unit, lecturing fellow cops about when and when not to beat the shit out of people on the streets. “Can’t fuck with Superman.” So says Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), on his way into a Baltimore Police Department building for what he believes will be a fairly routine investigation by Internal Affairs into a banged up vehicle he failed to properly report.

HBO's limited series 'We Own This City' takes a look at Baltimore's Gun Trace Task Force and how its cops became B'More's biggest crooks.

In case you’re wondering, McDougall is based on a real detective of the same name, but Steele is a character amalgamation. While the actual theft wasn’t filmed, it’s not hard to figure out that Jenkins was dirty and so was his squad. We Own This City, an adaptation of former Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book of the same name, is not only packed with characters, but its timeline jumps around a lot. Thankfully, as the characters are established and the mostly true story unfolds, the real Jenkins is revealed, and so is how he eventually got busted. Jenkins even joked that he understood the motivation to rough up mouthy perpetrators, but then explained that an officer’s inability to rein in his or her anger would only land them in court. One: Jon Bernthal is mesmerizing as the duplicitous Sgt. Wayne Jenkins. And two: The scenes where Jenkins isn’t the focus are slow and tedious.