The Wire’s creator David Simon and writer/producer George Pelecanos reunite to bring award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton’s We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption to life as an HBO limited series. We Own This City premieres on April 25, 2022 and explores one of the most disturbing police corruption scandals in recent history.
Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and his elite Gun Trace Task Force unit were charged with getting guns and drugs off the streets of Baltimore. But rather than help stop the surge in violent crimes (including murders), Jenkins chose to exploit the crisis to pad his bank account.
Frequent collaborators David Simon and George Pelecanos (they’ve previously worked together on The Wire, Treme, and co-created The Deuce) co-created, write, and executive produce We Own This City, delving back into a world they’re very familiar with for this new HBO drama.
During the 2022 Television Critics Association’s winter press panel, Pelecanos said he and Simon were happy to return to a city they know well.
“You know David’s history there and [co-executive producer and writer] Bill Zorzi was a Sun reporter. The book was written by Justin Fenton, a Baltimore Sun reporter. [Executive producer/writer] Ed Burns was a Baltimore cop and a Baltimore public school teacher for many years. So, there was a lot of knowledge about the subject and the context that we had to draw on and to pull all this stuff together,” said Pelecanos. “And then the other thing is we wanted to work in Baltimore. We have a history with crews there. They’re family. We like bringing work to Baltimore and we thought it could be a good microcosm of the country, knowing as much as we do about this city. But it could be any American city that we were discussing.”
Simon added: “Baltimore specifically – and I think this is common to many American cities – they committed over the last 30 years to the drug war, to fighting an aggressive drug prohibition and to mass arrest as a result that drug war. And as a consequence, it destroyed police work in a lot of fundamental ways. So, we watched it happen in our city, but it has happened in a lot of places in America.”
The level of police corruption and brutality depicted in We Own This City is The Wire taken to the nth degree. Simon explained that the officers involved in the Gun Trace Task Force weren’t even in the academy when The Wire wrapped up, and We Own This City explores the complete failure in policy by the Baltimore police department following years of drug warring and mass arrests.
“The Baltimore department that we depicted in The Wire had its problems and they were already committed to a lot of bad policy that was in fact the critique of The Wire,” explained Simon. “But the Gun Trace Task Force in this level of scandal, I mean where you had officers selling drugs back onto the street, that wasn’t happening in 2007. Not remotely.”
Simon continued: “There was corruption. There was brutality. There were things that we depicted in The Wire, but this is as if – to make an analogy to The Wire – in The Wire people like Carver and Herc and those kinds of characters, they were being trained by people who still had some residual sense of what a police department was supposed to be. Now, a generation later, the Hercs and the Carvers, they’re the supervisors. They’re the people who are training the next generation. And it’s become more profoundly dysfunctional and dystopian in one or two generations of policing.”
“The violation of constitutional rights as citizens was always there. And this is just a summing-up of what’s been coming for many years,” said Pelecanos.
We Own This City is based on Justin Fenton’s outstanding reporting, and the limited series will help shine a spotlight on the scandal that rocked the Baltimore Police Department. Simone hopes it will also serve as an argument against law enforcement’s approach to getting drugs off the streets.
“There’s an argument that we’re making with the show that is important, I think, and it’s this: we have to end the drug war. We have to take this overlay of warring against the communities that are the most vulnerable, that have the most economic deprivation, we have to take that and discard it because it’s not solving anything. It’s not addressing addiction in any meaningful or healthy way.
All it’s doing is filling prisons and leading police away from doing actual police work that cities need and leading them into doing the kind of police work that just brutalizes and degrades citizens and communities,” said Simon.
We Own This City stars Jon Bernthal, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rob Brown, Don Harvey, David Corenswet, Larry Mitchell, Ian Duff, Delaney Williams, and Lucas Van Engen. The six-episode limited series debuts Monday, April 25th on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
