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. 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%. A] searing look at [Baltimore's] recent police corruption scandal...Fans of TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire based on journalist David Simon's groundbreaking coverage of Baltimore will be engrossed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) Despite the downright nostalgic scenes of detectives poring over wiretaps and the numerous appearances from stars of The Wire, the most fitting point of comparison to We Own This City is Sidney Lumet's 1981 film Prince of the City, which is based on another real-life story about police corruption. It's no wonder that the film's star, Treat Williams, makes a crucial, almost winking cameo in the series. 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

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 two others — Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor—pleaded not guilty and were convicted in 2018. Fenton is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and he's had a front-row seat for the tragedies played out on the streets of Baltimore. He reported on the uprising after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody; his byline appeared on stories about some of the arrests and trials recounted in the book; and he's acquainted with plenty of the principals of the events in the book and with the culture in the city and in the infrastructure of the police department that made those events possible, if not inevitable. This is a portrait of a warped world in which violent sociopaths prosper in plain sight, so long as they have police badges slapped on to their quasi-Alpha puffed-out chests. Officers such as Wayne Jenkins ( The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal) and Daniel Hersl ( The Good Wife’s Josh Charles) do what they want – steal, racially target, wrongfully arrest, abuse – but are still praised for bringing in criminals. “If you want to do this job, you’re going to get complaints for doing this job,” drawls dead-eyed Hersl. British actor Wunmi Mosaku plays one of the investigators doggedly, elegantly, trying to stop the rot.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. If you do live in or near Baltimore, you know that the stories that "The Wire" tells hew close to actual events but aren't non-fiction, as they're meant to entertain and engage the viewer. Yeah, there's an aura of truth to the show, but it comes across as "inspired by" rather than "based on actual events." 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. But these challenges continue and I wonder how we will know if the department has fixed itself. How do we measure that, how do we quantify that, especially given the deep-seated bad feelings about this department?” As noted, the project feels a little messy in the early going, but the pieces come together in a compelling way, illustrating the deep roots of police excesses and the elusiveness of the political will to achieve genuine solutions.

Fenton, who reported on the trial, recalls: “Through the people cooperating and telling the truth, we gained a new level of understanding of how these things work that I don’t think we’ve had previously. They told us not just what they did but how and that was very eye-opening testimony. It’s like someone describing how they first stole money.

Seasons

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.” 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. These former officers also had nothing to fear outside of the BPD. Fenton explains that they often worked with or otherwise relied on officers from Baltimore County (an adjacent suburb) in connection with drug dealers that they (the former officers) knew lived in the county. Eventually, the county officers were warned to avoid a couple of the former officers, with one county detective stating that “county police, wary of getting dragged into questionable cases, began screening the city warrants before getting involved.” Rather than report their observations and fears, however, they were silent. Les chapitres sont super bien construits et une fois qu’on comprend la manière dont sera racontée « l’histoire », on plonge tête première et on se dit toujours « juste un dernier chapitre ». Executive produced byGeorge Pelecanos ( The Deuce) and David Simon ( The Wire) -- and based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton -- We Own This Cityis a six-hour, limited series chronicling the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force. Itexamines the corruption and 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.

Crime Reporter for the Baltimore Sun Justin Fenton covers one of the biggest scandals in Baltimore Police history in an absorbing account of Wayne Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (the GTTF). It is no surprise, then, that the GTTF’s victims “often didn’t bother to complain; those who did were mostly ignored.” Indeed, Fenton relates that the FBI agent leading the investigation of these former officers had difficulty convincing some victims to speak. Some victims, themselves involved in illegal drug activity, were distrustful of law enforcement, while others interpreted any cooperation with law enforcement as “snitching.” Ce roman ne se veut pas moralisateur. Il ne se veut pas non plus un outil de recherche ni être porteur de tous les problèmes d’une société. Mais il est juste, crédible et intéressant. 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.” A work of journalism that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit but can stand as the inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war.”—David SimonBromwich, a senior counsel at the law firm Steptoe, says by phone: “People were promoted without any sense of whether they would be capable of managing people. There was no specific training for supervisors. Supervisors had no incentive to report misconduct by their underlings because, given the culture of the police department, that would put them in a bad odour in the rest of the department.” United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department, Aug. 10, 2016 The astonishing true story of "one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation" ( New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their years-long plunder of Baltimore. Now comes Justin Fenton with "We Own This City." And I'm reminded that sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Jenkins duly tested his colleagues’ willingness to put personal loyalty to him above their oaths to uphold the law. Det James Kostoplis testified that, soon after joining the GTTF, he was asked by Jenkins to go for a ride. They drove a short distance to a side street where Jenkins told Kostoplis to leave his phone and equipment in the van and get out. We Own This City will inevitably draw comparisons to The Wire, given their shared Baltimore setting, and though the latter stands as the greater achievement, it's not necessarily the most meaningful resemblance. As much as We Own This City covers a lot of ground, the scope of The Wire stretched far beyond the police to an entire urban environment, capturing how every element of the social and political economy connected. We Own This City specifically focuses on policing, and suggests that it's actively worsened since the early 2000s when The Wire was set. The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore. Photograph: HBO I fought this war,” Treat Williams, playing a retired detective, tells Steele regarding the drug war. “It was lost when I got there. And I did nothing but lose in my time.” The writing is precise and logical and you can see in your mind's eye all that transpires over the years. The clear prose allows the reader to keep all the many subjects relatively clear in your mind.

We Own This City

Crime in Baltimore has been at extraordinarily high levels for decades, he adds, leading to an emphasis on crime fighting and its quantification: numbers of arrests and seizures and other measures. “That produces a culture taken to its extreme, which it was in Baltimore by many, that the ends justify the means,” Bromwich continues. 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. Based on the book "We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption" by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, this gritty drama chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force. It exposes the corruption and moral collapse that befalls an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest are championed at the expense of actual police work. Created and written by David Simon, creator of "The Wire," and George Pelecanos, production took place in Baltimore. The astonishing true story of "one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation" (the New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city.