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.” Fenton especially excels at the telling of a complex, exciting story based on voluminous research without the depiction of overwhelming statistics and data dragging into the storytelling. Fenton is also successful at portraying those targeted by Jenkins and his fellow police officers in a sympathetic manner even though they themselves are clearly not angels. While these patrons of the streets are committing criminal acts themselves, Fenton is still able to place a human face upon them. He also points out, as victims of robberies, home invasions, or planted or fabricated evidence, these targets realize it is futile to report such incidents because they know whose word will be believed. Over the years, as I describe in the book, it lost that focus and was just another unit of plainclothes officers running around the city. They didn’t trot these guys out for press conferences. It wasn’t that we heard about them all the time. They were working in the shadows, and deployed by the police department as another tool to roam the streets looking for guns.” 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

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.” If “The Wire” defined the futility of the drug war – and not incidentally ranks as one of the greatest series ever made in the eyes of a loyal few – its fictional look at policing Baltimore merges with a fact-based version in “We Own This City,” a spare but bleak window into a culture of corruption that plagued the city’s police department. 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. 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.” 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 WireWe Own This City starts out slowly, but after gaining its hold, the book unfolds like a relentless, well-crafted fictional police procedural. Only this time, the police are the villains and this is a true story. The cast includes Jon Bernthal ( The Walking Dead, Show Me a Hero),Josh Charles ( The Good Wife, In Treatment), Wunmi Mosaku ( Lovecraft Country), and Jamie Hector ( BOSCH, The Wire), among many others. See the full cast here. The series was shot in Baltimore and brings together several alumni of the The Wire, both on screen and behind the camera, including David Simon and George Pelecanos. But unlike that venerated saga, We Own This City is based on the true story told in the journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book of the same name. 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.

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. Impossible to put down and impossible to forget once finished. If you're wondering why the US is in the midst of protests and riots, read this book. I couldn't recommend it more highly.' Willy Vlautin 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. In February 2022, Hendrix and Ward were released from federal prison after being sentenced to seven years. It’s unclear why they were granted early release.It's as if the guys who had learned the worst elements of police work from the drug war and had failed to learn how to police properly...they're the ones explaining to the next generation of guys who are now coming on how not to do the job," Simon added. Police trained to disregard official training 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. Emily Sullivan, City Spending Board Approves 30 th Gun Trace Task Force Settlement, WYPR News, Jul. 21, 2021

Jamie Hector, who played ruthless drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, surfaces on We Own This City as Sean Suiter, an officer who finds it difficult to move on after serving on the Task Force. Delaney Williams, who played sarcastic homicide squad supervisor Jay Landsman on The Wire, is Baltimore's beleaguered police commissioner on the new show. 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. 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. 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.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.)