Most disturbing, however, was the inaction of prosecutors and defense attorneys. In perhaps the most haunting passage of the book, Fenton describes the immediate aftermath of the arrests of seven of the GTTF former officers. He quotes one prosecutor, who later reflected (and claimed) that defense attorneys, “in almost every case” conveyed that, accordingly to their client, the officer was “dirty.” However, the prosecutor continued, “[u]nless you have something concrete to show me, I have nothing to go off except your guy doesn’t want to be prosecuted.” Fenton then reveals that,

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 SimonFenton 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. The unmissable My Name Is Leon, on BBC Two, is a 90-minute adaptation of Kit de Waal’s acclaimed novel. Written by Shola Amoo and directed by Lynette Linton (artistic director at the Bush theatre in London), it stars newcomer Cole Martin as a mixed-race boy in foster care who yearns to be reunited with Jake, his white baby half-brother. 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.

The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore. Photograph: HBO 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. This silence extended to state and federal prosecutors. In one case, a judge ruled that the number of internal affairs complaints filed against former GTTF officer Daniel Hersl was so high that defense counsel could mention them at the trial of the three individuals he arrested. However, “rather than air Hersl’s history, city prosecutors dropped the case.” Likewise, Fenton continues, federal prosecutors in Baltimore’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, concerned about the credibility of some of the former officers, “knew enough to steer clear of GTTF cases and . . . quietly dismissed a half dozen that were pending on the federal side.” The takeaway here (at least to this reader) is that external law enforcement entities —police officers and prosecutors — knew things smelled bad, but merely held their noses. As a result, the stench worsened. We Own This City suffers from various minor issues. The all-round stellar performances from the cast are frequently underserved by Reinaldo Marcus Green's rote direction. The drama can feel a little mechanical at times, likely because it closely hews to the facts of the real-life case, and the storyline involving Suiter in particular sometimes scans as a too-symbolic contrast to the GTTF story, as if to clumsily underscore the fact that there are actually good cops around. 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.

How the GTTF terrorized the city of Baltimore

This emphasis on numbers and quantity over quality really had a corrosive effect on the police department and influenced the conduct of officers. Once they realized that the rules that supposedly exist didn’t really exist, it’s a slippery slope into saying, ‘Well, I’m dealing with bad guys and they’ve made a lot of money through dealing drugs or whatever. 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. Emily Sullivan, City Spending Board Approves 30 th Gun Trace Task Force Settlement, WYPR News, Jul. 21, 2021 Former members of the GTTF. From top left, Daniel Hersl, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and from bottom left, Maurice Ward, Momodu Gando, Wayne Jenkins and Thomas Allers. Photograph: AP Between my interest in David Simon and my interest in the Freddie Gray case, I pay some attention to my birth city of Baltimore, and I knew a reasonable amount about the Gun Trace Task Force. My partner and I watched the TV dramatization of this book and appreciated it, and that led me to the book itself.

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 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. 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.” Mr. Fenton is a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, David Simon’s early home as a reporter. It was Simon who suggested the idea for a book that would tell the story of what happened in Baltimore up to and including cases such as Freddy Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. The book is superb, with a title taken from a quote by one of Fenton’s primary sources, a member of the Crips gang. Speaking about the city, the gangs, and the police: “We still run this shit…as a police officer, you can literally only do what we allow you to do. We–as far as the community itself, even the drug dealers–we run this city.”” In the academy, they teach you constitutional policing...then as soon as they go out, [a superior says] 'Everything you just learned is b***s***, this is Baltimore,'" Pelecanos says. "We talked to police who told us that's exactly what happened to them. They were told to throw out everything they had learned that was correct...It's kind of a tragedy."United States v. Police Department of Baltimore City, et. al., Civil No. JBK-17-99, Consent Decree (filed Jan. 12, 2017) 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.

The author here imparts valuable lessons, the most important of which is that police abuse, brutality, cruelty, and criminality do not – and cannot – persist in a vacuum. It takes systems to victimize perpetually. The systems that were supposedly in place to root out, contain, and stop the GTTF’s criminal and unconstitutional policing at the outset did nothing but look the other way or otherwise cheer on the aggressive, barrel-chested policing tactics that were the GTTF’s hallmarks. As one last example, Fenton relates an instance when a judge ruled that Wayne Jenkins and his squad did not have a legally sufficient reason to stop a person they arrested for supposedly tossing a gun. After suppressing the gun and dismissing the case, the judge actually praised Jenkins and his squad for their work. So much for the fourth amendment’s exclusionary rule serving as a deterrent to unconstitutional policing. 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.

Baltimore’s history of police corruption

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.