Officers tell me that it’s a new day over there and everybody’s wearing body cameras all the time, which wasn’t the case until pretty late in the investigation of the gun trace taskforce. So you have to think that’s making a difference. Which of course it eventually did. The GTTF guys got caught by chance; a federal investigation began; and the gang was busted. Most of them are currently doing time, and those who aren't in prison are at least not cops anymore. The worst, saddest bit of this, though, is a family who lost a husband and a father, under circumstances that remain mysterious, a death that remains an unsolved homicide -- at least in the files of BPD. 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.) 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. What are little things like constitutional requirement such as probable cause or reasonable suspicion when Jenkins was quoted as saying that some of the advice he got early in his career was, ‘Never let probable cause stand in the way of a good arrest?’ That says it all, which was the law was a pesky thing that you could ignore if you couldn’t avoid it.

Fenton, 38, who worked for the Baltimore Sun newspaper for 17 years and is now at the Baltimore Banner, a new non-profit newsroom, says: “I do definitely wonder if it happens again, if it’s happening right now, will I know? Will members of the community reach out to us? Will it be reported? 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. 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. 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.

Success!

Jenkins is our gateway into this world of dirty cops, but he's not the sole focus. Instead, he's merely the embodiment of a culture that rewards unethical conduct with higher profits and bigger promotions, on the far-end of a spectrum of corruption. 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. 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. 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. 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. In We Own This City, Justin Fenton has produced 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. Born of fearmongering and race-baiting, that conflict has now, in the end, not only dehumanized millions and savaged cities but has also, with some irony, destroyed police work itself. Baltimore, and by extension urban America, has been crawling into this abyss for decades, and nothing, not even utter failure, was going to stop us. We have arrived." - David Simon, author of Homicide, co-author of The Corner, and creator of The Wire 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%.

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. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and both Faber & Faber as well as Random House Publishing for an ecopy of this book. This was released February 2021. I am providing an honest review.

Seasons

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • 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 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.