Review: We Own This City

     More and more, every year, larger amounts of people are given more evidence to the corruption our nation’s police are guilty of profiteering off of, hiding, or doing what else they can with it. This is what the HBO exclusive We Own This City tells us.

While there are far too many cases and precincts to cover in one report, the city of Baltimore, Maryland has been a huge target since the first initial years of the new millennium.

The reason for Baltimore’s attention

This is largely in part thanks to the ever-famous and critically celebrated HBO series The Wire, which David Simon also created, alongside his writing partner and former homicide detective Ed Burns.

It gives an exquisitely deep look into the systemic rot stinking out of Baltimore from various angles (education, news broadcasting, etc.) over the show’s five seasons

Being applicable to the United States at large, although still timely despite its release around the mid-aughts, its mini-series update in the form of We Own This City is really just a check-up.

One that aims to see if we’re still aware of blue lines of corruption and walls of silences, while still being a justifiably great standalone nonetheless.

A different approach to story

As a matter of fact, Sonny Bunch weighed the two in his own Op-Ed for the Washington Post, saying that, “…“The Wire” is a show about people trying and failing.

“We Own This City” is about people who have failed and don’t particularly care about anything other than grabbing what they can from the wreckage…it’s at least in part an indictment of how people who claim to love “The Wire” failed to act on that enthusiasm”.

Unlike The Wires’ observation of an entire city network, We Own This City squarely follows a squad of five-to-seven officers inside the ‘Gun Trace Task Force’.

It has a laser focus on how this group splits heads like the cash they covet instead of being ‘honorable’ at their jobs; whatever that means to these and other Baltimoreans.

Wayne Jenkins

Our titular blue boy is none other than the infamous Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), who’s getting put out to pasture finally as his decade-long abuses inevitably caught up with him.

We only find out how full of sin he really is through continuous flashbacks, the majority of them prefaced by a data search to clue us into the exact time and the crime under investigation.

Brian Tallerico’s own review for the website Roger Ebert describes his cracks as, “…capturing this man’s deep insecurity in his shifty eyes—watch the scene in which Jenkins witnesses a Freddie Gray protest getting more intense to see the constant fear in this man’s soul”.

While he has his share of moments where he acts formidable, certainly a bully being funded on behalf of the state, this one during the outbreak of protests in response to the murder of the aforementioned victim strips away the lion he supposedly emboldens.

We see protestors squared up against riot patrol, Jenkins at front, but recoils from the sheer spite and immobility of the protestors, even after knocking a man down and assuredly deflecting bricks with his riot shield.

The ensemble

There are more than him of course, Momodu Gondo (McKinley Belcher III) Jemell Rayam (Darell Britt-Gibson) and Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles) as some of the others in this container of bad apples, still not that distant from the barrel of which they came from.

Each one falls in on the conning and legalized crime they claim to work against, adding distinct traits to the city’s already poor infrastructure.

Chasing them comes down to making connections between all of Jenkin’s past breeches, hence the myriad of flashbacks, as they’re intercut between the investigation team and DOJ agent Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), both investigating the same case within the Baltimore police department.

All this while, everyone talks in very bureau-centric terms and with unique inflections, adding to the strong realism that enhanced The Wire.

Continuous rot

But it would be a severe mistake to think that justice is also part of the series’s realism.

The city of Baltimore has not fared much better since the events occurring after its progenitor, the 2008 recession and the failures of the Obama Administration to deal with the many problems showcased in The Wire.

For the record, Obama doesn’t get a pass for favoriting it, like many other establishment Liberals. The former’s focus is solemn contemplation, then the latter’s is damnation, coupled with institutional naiveté.

With a rogue’s gallery of deputies stepping in and dropping out over numerous personal and departmental scandals, the police force continues to scar and strangle the city of Baltimore.

It’s one not even a full hour away from our nation’s capital and a major indictment against this country’s supposed ‘greatness’.

The main takeaway

Over the course of We Own This City, there are no characters that effectively overhaul Baltimore’s policing or usher in any ‘Veritas Et Justitia’.

The only results are shipments out of crooks under protection for an exchange of new customs that manage the churning of new crooks.

This show is a must see for anyone interested in systemic corruption, or for fans of The Wire who missed the point of the show.

It’s as timely as ever, and oh so ready to serve you up piss and vinegar in the wake of all the jobbery to still be coming out of this city, and for Washington’s lack of solutions.

The GTTF is simply par for the course.