And maybe that’s the point these disgraced officers are just a few of the many bad apples. In a show consumed with putting the system on trial, none of the actors are allowed the range to stand out. Each offers a different piece in the puzzle of Jenkins. The second investigation involves FBI agents interrogating smart-mouth former cops Momodu “G Money” Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Maurice Ward (Rob Brown) in prison. A mysterious tracker attached to the dealer’s car and a few careless whispers caught on wiretaps lead the investigators to the feet of Jenkins and his Gun Trace Task Force - a squad assigned to stop drugs and guns from proliferating on the streets only to resort to crime, theft, abuse, and drug dealing themselves.Īt times, in its piecing together of the Rubik’s Cube of clues, We Own This City maneuvers like True Detective season 1, but with far less dexterity. The first begins in 2015, with Detectives McDougall (David Corenswet) and Kilpatrick (Larry Mitchell) scoping a drug dealer. The nonlinear narrative - spanning 2003 to 2017 and told mostly through Jenkins’ eyes, the nearest the series has to a main character - tracks four seemingly separate investigations. It’s left everyone on edge, still searching for answers.

See, ever since Gray’s death, crime is high and the arrests are low because cops are unwilling to leave their cars for fear their “good” policing will be mistaken for bad (what constitutes “good” policing is never wholly explained in the series). Justin Fenton’s nonfiction novel of the same name, adapted by Simon and Pelecanos ( The Wire), is set in a city still reeling from the 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent uprising it spawned. We Own This City is a ruminative show with a multitude of moving parts - too many, in fact. In the six-episode limited series directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green ( King Richard), Bernthal’s line explains the root of the problem and establishes the actor as the lone pulse in a dull and deliberate series that puts the system on trial but has little time for the people. It’s nearly played as a throwaway line by Bernthal, a dash that compounds a montage taking viewers through the systematic inequality and state-sponsored terrorism in Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore city police harassing young Black men, the extralegal courts sentencing African Americans to harsh sentences, and the dehumanized Black men standing, petrified, in prison.

Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) smirks to a room of cadets in creators David Simon and George Pelecanos’ HBO crime series We Own This City.

“Most police worth their shit, they can write their way out of anything,” Sgt.

Justin fenton we own this city review