Exactly 14 years after “The Wire” ended, the creator of the series, considered by many to be one of the best of all time, David Simon, has returned to the crime scene. In Baltimore, where the legendary Inspector Jimmy McNulty, played by Dominic West, is no more, but the situation now seems to be even worse than the time we followed the adventures of this unconventional detective. And while “The Wire” has a comprehensive insight into the way crime and corruption work through dealers, port workers, newspapers, politicians and society, the six-part mini-series co-authored with Simon by George Pelecanos primarily deals with corruption in Baltimore police.
Pelecanos has been collaborating with Simon since the time of “Wire”, for which he wrote several episodes, and then together they created a quality series “The Deuce” set in New York in the 70’s and 80’s. “We Own This City” is based on the book of the same name by journalists from the same newspaper that Simon and The Baltimore Sun once worked on, and we follow this horrifying story of corruption and crime in the Baltimore Police. And everything we will see here has really happened and in a non-linear narrative we follow the rise and fall of the Weapons Seizure Department and the corruption that surrounds it. The main character is Sergeant Wayne Jenkins in a fantastic performance by Jon Bernthal, an extremely busy actor who has performed in everything and everything, but the role of this corrupt cop is probably the best in his career.
Jenkins and his department faced allegations of corruption and various other crimes in 2018 and 2019, and in parallel with the investigation against Jenkins and his companions conducted by internal control and the FBI, we are monitoring what they did and how they did it. What it looked like is perhaps best described by a statement at the peak of the series when a police chief points out that some of his colleagues acted like gangsters in the 1930s. Compared to “The Wire”, times have changed even more because in the meantime racial issues have intensified again, often police violence against blacks is often in the foreground. Especially after police killed young black man Freddie Gray in 2015 which led to serious unrest and protests.
It is a city where it has become completely normal to provide money in the budget to compensate the victims of police brutality, but nothing concrete is being resolved. The main thing is still to achieve certain arrest quotas, and as is often the case, many police officers are real raw materials that are almost indistinguishable from those who should be arrested. And there is nothing unambiguous and simple because it is clear that there are honest cops who are bothered by guys like Jenkins and his company, but it is also clear that Baltimore is a city full of scum, criminals, murderers, dealers and drug addicts as we met in “Wire” . While I’m a little sorry that these six episodes seem to be everything when it comes to “We Own This City,” Simon and Pelecanos managed to round out this shocking, terrifying, and brutal story in an impressive way.
As much as it is a story about police corruption, it is deeply a complex series about a vicious circle from which there is no way out. Although today everyone is probably aware that what Reagan called the war on drugs in the eighties has long been lost, nothing new is being tried, but these old, obviously unsuccessful methods are still being forced. It seems all this and especially cynical, pessimistic because those few who may have the will, energy and desire to try to change something, after years of banging their heads against the wall, realize that it makes no sense and retreat to other areas of interest. Great effect the authors have achieved by hiring the same actors who appeared in “Wire” for some episodic roles, and those who loved this ingenious series, will certainly not go wrong with “We Own This City”.
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