Language: English
The truth about Baltimore’s systemic dysfunction has always been stranger, uglier and knottier than fiction. Reading about its drug, homicide, policing and administrative problems can take you into a rabbit hole you can’t get out of. The bleak reality of the city shaped five seasons of The Wire, which remains one of the most incisive feats in longform storytelling on TV. David Simon, the Baltimore Sun reporter who was the creator of the HBO series, returns to the corners, the streets and the police precincts to sound another warning about a system in paralysis.
Baltimore stays on as the lead character in Simon’s new miniseries, We Own This City. Epitomising the incurable malady afflicting the city this time around is the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), an elite Baltimore Police Department (BPD) unit tasked with getting guns and drugs off the street. The reality was far different: these officers pocketed the money during seizures, sold stolen drugs, planted evidence, robbed law-abiding citizens, and made overtime claims for unworked hours. The reign of terror ended with federal indictments, with eight members sentenced to prison. The GTTF’s blatant abuse of power was the subject of Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton’s book, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, and now its adaptation by Simon and frequent collaborator George Pelecanos.
The show presents a demoralising account of how the public’s trust in the police, the elected officials and the government is destroyed when those meant to protect and serve are the very ones habitually violating people’s constitutional rights. What’s worse is the establishment continued to protect and serve these rogue policemen, despite repeated complaints filed by the apprehended criminals and the general public. To trace the rise and the fall of the GTTF, the episodes cover a time period from 2003 to 2017 to draw the whole picture.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who is coming off the recent success of King Richard, shines a light on how corruption, racism and violence intersect in a majority black city. As he takes nonlinear storytelling to an extreme, the show often undercuts itself by toggling back and forth between one too many characters, perspectives and timelines.
There are moments when you are not sure who’s when and where. Once you get on its wavelength, the show rewards your patience.
The chief investigation is led by the police corruption task force made up of federal prosecutor Leo Wise (Lucas Van Engen), FBI agent Erika Jensen (Dagmara Domińczyk) and BPD officer John Sieracki (Don Harvey). We follow the trio right from the beginning of their investigation to their interrogation of the arrested GTTF members Momodu Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Maurice Ward (Rob Brown). A secondary investigation takes us to what was the beginning of the end for GTTF.
Detectives David McDougall (David Corenswet) and Scott Kilpatrick (Larry Mitchell), two Narcotics officers, track down a local dealer whose bad batch of heroin is linked to multiple overdoses. On arresting him, they find two tracking devices on his car: one is their own, the other was lent to Gondo. Our proxy in the story is Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), a Civil Rights attorney conducting an inquiry into the culture of police brutality and corruption in Baltimore. Steele’s bafflement, anger and eventual resignation mirrors our own emotional journey across the six episodes.
With the fallout over the death of Freddie Gray and the rising crime rate, the BPD brought on Sergeant Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) to lead the GTTF to seize the drugs and guns flooding the streets. As the show reveals, he did to a degree, only not by the book. While he upped the arrest quotas, he also upped the corruption by many levels. Bernthal is an absolute force of nature as Jenkins, a charismatic, hubristic, revolting and delusional man who can justify any moral transgression as a necessary evil. We watch Jenkins steal money and drugs, engage in fatal car chases, and call a colleague to help plant a toy gun after killing an unarmed suspect — all without oversight. We hear how squad member Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles) had as many as 50 complaints of brutality on his record, but was allowed to patrol the streets simply because he more than delivered the quota.
Through GTTF member turned homicide detective Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector), we get a glimpse of how Jenkins peer-pressured members of his squad. Suiter died under mysterious circumstances a day before he was scheduled to testify against Jenkins and his gang of criminals. The show leans towards the ruling of the independent review — which ruled it to be a death by suicide — suggesting Suiter may have taken his own life over the guilt of his brief GTTF involvement. That Jenkins passed the blame onto the dead officer to evade a false evidence charge tells you everything you need to know about him.
Indeed, the Jenkins, the Hersls and the Gondos are a symptom of a rot that goes much deeper. The show puts the entire system on trial, not just a bunch of dirty cops. A system that endorses a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy, offers state-sponsored impunity for police abuse, pushes for results over method, and treats everything, lives included, as a numbers game. In the show, we see mayors and commissioners elected to office outline bold visions, only to resign within months over fraud and tax evasion charges. As there remains a huge gap between policing and public policy in theory and in practice, there also remains a mutual distrust between the community and its government. The failures of policing communities of colour stem from a long history of institutional racism in the US. And the failures of public policy have left the community in an endless cycle of poverty, addiction and violence.
In one of the show’s more telling conversations, Steele meets with Brian Grabler, an ex-cop who became a teacher after becoming disillusioned with the system. Grabler retraces the source of the rot to the so-called “war on drugs,” a five-decade-old public policy that has only been counterproductive, adding to the violence rather than reducing it. “Everything changed when they came up with that expression, “The War on Drugs.” What an idiotic fucking thing to say. Waging a war against citizens by definition is separating us into two opposing camps. And with the war comes police militarisation. SWAT teams, tactical squads, stop-and-frisk, strip searches, a complete gutting of the Fourth Amendment. And it’s like we’re, we’re fighting terrorists on foreign soil. And you can’t just blame the cops. We serve the politicians, who thrive on being tough on crime,” he says, before perfectly summing it up in a follow-up conversation, “And in a war, you need warriors. In a war, you have enemies. In a war, civilians get hurt and nobody does anything. In a war, you count the bodies and then you call them victories.”
All six episodes of We Own This City are now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.
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source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/we-own-this-city-review-spiritual-follow-up-to-the-wire-exposes-a-failure-of-policing-and-public-policy-10745761.html
