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HBO’s brutal new crime drama We Own This City takes a look at the rise and fall of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, or the GTTF through surprisingly intimate portrayals of the real people caught in the center of the scandal. The series is based on former [Baltimore] Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s non-fiction book of the same name and has been produced by two of the crime genre’s all-time greats: George Pelecanos and David Simon.
The duo previously tackled the twin monsters of crime and
police corruption in the HBO masterpiece, The Wire and worked
together on HBO shows Treme and The Deuce.
While The Wire was a sweeping opera showing
the interconnection between law enforcement, the drug trade, ports, politics,
and journalism, We Own This City – also shot in Baltimore -
looks at a very specific group of corrupt cops.
“It’s a devastating six episode limited series that will
leave you feeling raw, even if it ends with a whole bunch of bad guys behind
bars,” says Decider which carries an interview with the showrunners.
“The truth is that law enforcement runs the spectrum. So
does the street for that matter,” Simon said. “Everyone starts on the human
scale somewhere.”
In 2017, eight Baltimore Police Officers who worked in the
Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) were found guilty of using their positions to
shakedown civilians for cash, falsifying police records, and scamming their way
to outsized overtime paychecks.
Fenton, who worked as a consultant on the show, says the
level of corruption was absolutely staggering. “It spans dozens if not hundreds
of incidents under our noses.
“There’s been so much rightful attention on police brutality
and so we know when an officer shoots somebody there’s an injury, there’s a
death. But this type of casual everyday lying, stealing, misrepresenting
information, in some cases framing people – it’s hard to prove and for that
reason it often went unaddressed.”
We Own This City looks at these crimes,
primarily through the story of the group’s ringleader, Sgt Wayne Jenkins (played by Jon Bernthal). He was praised
as a positive role model who enjoyed the admiration and respect of his
superiors. He was given special privileges; the elite unit came to be seen by
senior commanders as “a bulwark against chaos.” Jenkins is now serving
a prison sentence until January 2039.
Simon explained to Decider that they seized upon Jenkins as
their primary character because he had the “longest chronology” to cover.
“If you live by the mantra that, ‘ACAB,’ all cops are
bastards, or you live by the mantra of Back the Blue, you’re probably not going
to be particularly satisfied with some parts of this mini-series,” Simon said.
The story of Jenkins, his colleagues and accomplices, and
the scandal surrounding them is a complex one. “The level of detail is
intentional,” Pelecanos told Time. “If we have any fears about doing these
shows, it’s that a person in Baltimore will look at our Baltimore show and say,
That was bullsh-t. Same thing when we did The Deuce in New
York. If one person knows we didn’t get it right, it bothers me.”
At times, We Own This City feels more like a
documentary than a TV drama.
“You have
to deny yourself the perfect drama sometimes,” Simon told TIME. “Sometimes you
have to say, that this would be the grander arc if we could portray it this
way, [or] it the guy had a more poetic line. And sometimes you have to kill
those, because they deny the reality that you are responsible if you’re dealing
with nonfiction material.”
Some might
say this is a peak moment for based-on-truth TV dramas but Pelecanos says their
take is different.
“People like to see rich and successful people get taken
down. That’s why a show like Law & Order is so popular.
It’s always the person who lives on Central Park West that did a murder. It’s a
false narrative; it makes people feel like yeah, there is justice. The truth is
those people don’t go to jail. I think shows that highlight the realities stand
out more.”
But they’re not just interested in facts – they want to
convey the feeling of committing these crimes, suggests The Playlist,
“the seductiveness, the ease, and most of all, the entitlement.” Jenkins has a
short but punchy speech where he explains exactly why he feels he should help
himself, and while the view is certainly not endorsed, the writers at least
attempt to understand it.
“We don’t believe “back the blue” or the “thin blue line” is
the motif that you need to take into a serious discussion about law
enforcement,” Simon told TIME. “But we also don’t believe that ‘defund the
police’ works as a simple mantra that solves anything. We live in the middle.
There’s a role and a mission for good police work that’s not happening
in Baltimore, which is the most dangerous it’s been in modern history. If
you live for a slogan and that’s where you reside in your assessments of what’s
going on in America, you will be disappointed in the arguments that we’re
trying to present.”
This is not The Wire returns but the issues explored
in that show’s six seasons are continued here. In many cases the corruption and
complexity has multiplied.
“About 40, 50 years ago, we started emphasizing the wrong
things and judging police work by the wrong metrics. Baltimore and the Gun
Trace Task Force is the coda,” Simon told Decider. “We started arguing these
things in The Wire, but things have reached a pass and ultimately
some of the characters we depicted in The Wire were already off the
rails, but they weren’t dragging the whole department with them — you know, the
Hersls and Carvers of The Wire — they’re now the Colonels and
the Majors. And they’re now training the lieutenants in the story in how not to
do police work the right way.”
“So, the institutional memory of a lot of these agencies has
now become lock everybody up, put dope and guns on the table and turn the other
way when things get dirty instead of doing actual police,” Simon said. “That’s
what happened in Baltimore.”
One thing that happened since The Wire is
smartphones. “The technology really made a difference,” says TIME Pelecanos.
“Everybody can record what’s going on in the streets, and people can’t lie as
easily because it’s on record. [The officer who killed George Floyd] never
would have been convicted without the footage from the iPhone.”
We Own This City’s plot hops back and forth in time
so we can see the cause and effect of the GTTF’s crimes. Pelecanos and Simon admitted to Decider they
were worried about this risky way of plotting the series, but Simon said, “If
we went linearly, it becomes just a story of here are these bad cops and we’re
going to catch them. We really wanted it to be about the why. Why did this
situation come to the place it did? How did these people come about?”
It hasn’t entirely worked. “The show’s biggest flaw, one of
the few it shares with other true-crime dramas, is a fractured chronology that
emphasizes cleverness over comprehension,” critiques Variety. “With this much
happening at once, all the onscreen datelines in the world aren’t enough to
avert the sense of being unmoored from time. But that may be a quibble for a
show like ‘City,’ which is inspired by a type of true crime so pervasive and
deep-rooted that only the tools and tactics evolve over time.”
All of the episodes are directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King
Richard), “who does his best to keep the complicated chronology straight,”
finds Playlist. “He mostly succeeds, though this is not casual viewing, and
viewers who use TV as background while scrolling or doing chores will likely be
lost.
“That’s on them; what’s more pressing is Green’s lack of visual
flair, his inability to make the (many, many) scenes of people sitting in rooms
talking look like anything more dynamic than people sitting in rooms talking.
It’s a tough task, to be sure, but the best directors of The Wire
figured it out.”
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