‘We Own This City’: Can a show about corruption lead to better policing?

After the critical acclaim of “The Wire,” it was always going to take a huge story for its creator, David Simon, to return to the world of crime, drugs, and the Baltimore Police Department.

But when the real-life corruption scandal of the city’s Gun Trace Task Force was exposed in the spring of 2017, Mr. Simon didn’t immediately see the criminal acts of the officers as a television show. Instead, he called Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton and told him, “This is a book. You need to step back and gather up your reporting,” Mr. Simon, who used to have the same beat at the paper, recounts in a recent interview.

Mr. Fenton did just that with “We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption.” Released in February 2021, the book details how, with murders increasing and riots flaring up across the city after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the BPD looked to Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and his plainclothes unit to help rid the streets of guns and drugs. Mr. Jenkins and his crew, it turns out, were using the power of the Gun Trace Task Force to steal thousands of dollars from citizens, sell drugs obtained during raids, and plant evidence. Their misconduct resulted in a raft of wrongful convictions. 

After reading the manuscript for the book, George Pelecanos, who wrote for “The Wire” and co-created “The Deuce” with Mr. Simon, suggested they make it into a show. 

Yet it couldn’t “just be about corrupt cops. That’s been done before,” says Mr. Pelecanos. “But the state of policing in America was at a tipping point. All these things had happened since ‘The Wire,’ especially with the Freddie Gray uprising, which pushed us to really tell the story.”

“We Own This City” debuted this spring on HBO, with the fifth of six episodes available on May 23. The series gave Mr. Simon and Mr. Pelecanos – who developed, executive-produced, and wrote for it – a chance to “restate the basic theme of ‘The Wire,’” says Mr. Simon, which is the futility of the drug war. It also allowed them to explore the systemic problems in the police department.

“The system allowed these guys to be corrupted,” says Mr. Pelecanos.

Their show, says Mr. Simon, tries to get at, “Why is this story indicative of the problems of policing in this country? Why is [policing] worth fighting for?” 

“It’d be very simple to just say this guy [Mr. Jenkins] was pure evil and he’s a bad apple. But there’s something wrong with the orchard,” he adds. 

In the opening episode, future Gun Trace Task Force member Daniel Hershl (Josh Charles) pulls over a father for no reason and then emasculates him in front of his son. Mr. Pelecanos says he wanted to convey how the officer intentionally makes the driver feel powerless. 

After reading Mr. Fenton’s book, Michael Pinard, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, says that he was happy to hear that the talent behind “The Wire” would be adapting it. “Particularly given the creators, I thought it would be important to tell the horrific story, but only if the story was situated within the broader policing issues in Baltimore and the institutional racism that allowed the Gun Trace Task Force to thrive,” he says.

He notes that the show has highlighted how the Department of Justice was involved with the BPD even before Mr. Gray’s death, “which hints at the systemic issues that were then detailed and displayed in infamy after his death.”

“No show can tug at all the roots of institutional racism,” he adds. “But I hope that viewers are asking the questions of why these officers were emboldened to commit these crimes and why they were able to get away with so much for so long. They saw their victims as disposable, and institutional racism set the stage for them. We need to get at the layers of why.”

Police departments need to figure out how to make “officers the true partners of residents and the guardians of these communities,” he says.

“What would happen if we actually rewarded police for doing the work that the cities need?” wonders Mr. Simon, who wants “We Own This City” to provoke discussions on police reform. “If you talk to people in the neighborhoods that are most vulnerable, they don’t want to be harried and brutalized by the police over stuff that doesn’t matter.”

That’s part of the reason Mr. Simon and Mr. Pelecanos wanted to write about the injustice of the mass police stops, arrests, and incarcerations in the city, and the impact those have on the victims.  

Residents would regularly come up to them while the series was filming and reveal that they’d been robbed or harassed by members of the Gun Trace Task Force. “You really got a sense of how impacted they were by these events and how powerless they felt,” says Mr. Pelecanos, who wants the show to provide a voice for those who have been affected by these issues.

“We Own This City,” directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard”), takes a nonlinear approach, showing in the first episode, for example, Mr. Jenkins (played by Jon Bernthal) being arrested. Subsequent episodes then look at his rise through the police ranks, including how, according to the show, he was told to disregard his training – alternating between that background and key events in the timeline of the Gun Trace Task Force.

Mr. Fenton hopes the program will convince people to demand that their police departments operate with more transparency and accountability. “The inclusion of civilian and oversight boards is something that can help,” says Mr. Fenton, who is the first to admit that he “doesn’t have the answers.”

“Baltimore is in an existential moment of, ‘What do we want police to do?’” he says. “For some people, I think the answer is defund the police: Take the money and put it in places where it can make a difference from the root causes. But there’s a tremendous fear that if you pull police out, there will be serious, deep problems in the city, and all hell will break loose. ... [The police] have to figure out how to reform the department, while still keeping people safe.”

“We Own This City” is rated TV-MA for adult content and language, violence, and some nudity. It airs Monday nights on HBO and streams on HBO Max.