We Own This City

'We Own This City' star Jon Bernthal and director Reinaldo Marcus Green discuss shooting Wayne Jenkins' arrest in Episode 1 of the HBO show.

It’s a conversation that I think they’ve been having for 20 years since The Wire. And I just feel lucky to have been along for the ride.” That doesn’t mean that I don’t have problems with the institution. Like they want little or nothing to do with Wayne or anything that Wayne has to offer because they only see them as ‘Wayne Jenkins.’ They don’t see him as the person. To go in to these different districts and departments and say, ‘Hey, we’re making a piece about the Gun Trace Task Force and some of the most corrupt police officers in the history of your department,’ it would be rare that you would be, you know, treated with open arms.” And some of them were actually in that scene with us.” The actors playing the officers who had to confront and arrest Wayne Jenkins were actually the real people who had been responsible for arresting the real Wayne Jenkins. We Own This City star Jon Bernthal and director Reinaldo Marcus Green revealed they were blessed to have not only the cooperation of Baltimore, the city, but the current police department.

From the creators of The Wire, We Own This City exposes the rampant corruption in Baltimore law enforcement.

In terms of execution, We Own This City feels bleaker when looking at the future but tells a critical story lost in mainstream media. We Own This City captures the heart of Baltimore in its brief glimpses of the streets, although, at times, it seems a bit wooden. It is depicted as another facet of the job, spoils of a constructed war. We Own This City is based on the true story of the Gun Trace Task Force. The GTTF consisted of nine members at its conception, but eight out of the nine police officers were involved in crime. Jenkins is charismatic, relying on his own misguided intuition to lay out the details of why what he is doing is not a crime. It took generations of police officers to get to this point, and now it might take a few more for these practices to disappear. In an alternate story to the police running rampant, an attorney (Mosaku) for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights section has begun her own investigation into the city’s police corruption. That is the story we are given in We Own This City. Brutality is the name of this game, and this show is letting you know that there is a fine line between what is morally acceptable in law enforcement. He is charismatic and well-connected to both Baltimore County and Harford County police—exposing that this is an issue beyond the Baltimore City Police Department. That may not be illegal, but these officers will stretch the limits of the law and bend it to the point of breaking it. The department has also been criticized repeatedly for its excessive use of violence, mainly against African-American men, which has led to death in the case of Freddie Grey. But there is one television show that many may remember when it comes to Baltimore’s cops: The Wire. Created by former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, the show exposed the real-life conditions currently faced in the city in regard to urban life and law enforcement.

A crime drama series, the We Own This City TV show is based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. It stars Jon Bernthal, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie ...

There can be other economic factors involved in a show’s fate, but typically the higher-rated series are renewed and the lower-rated ones are cancelled. While that beloved Baltimore-based series ran for five seasons, We Own This City appears to have been designed as a single-season mini-series of six episodes. The We Own This City series on HBO was written by David Simon and George Pelecanos who also worked on The Wire TV show together.

HBO has released its most recent crime drama, We Own This City which narrates the story of the other side of the world of crime.

Daniel Hersl is a former police detective who was one of the many officers charged with numerous crimes during his time in service. We Own This City in its first episode attempts to introduce us to Hersl and several other police officers who were caught indulging in wrongful activities. The miniseries portrays a grim and disturbing story of the corrupt cops in the Baltimore Police Department, specifically the officers who were part of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF).

Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Jamie Hector, and Wunmi Mosaku spoke to Newsweek about "We Own This City" and how they felt filming its difficult ...

"The goal is going to be to not let that happen again. It had to be that group of people for me to feel like I could do it, because it leaves you with scars that will never go away." "I had to speak to my mother and ask her for permission to even do the role. "My only hope for any project is that someone is changed and moved by it. "I loved how strong she was in her conviction and moral compass. "You know, who are these people and what do they think the job is? "Sometimes you don't even realise it affected you until you have a conversation with the young lady they put in place for us and she said, 'Listen, this can be happening to you. This guy is no longer here, you're looking at the five babies that he's raised and you're like, 'Wow, oh man, he's gone.' And you're listening to how his wife spoke about him... I'd be on a laptop looking at Sean Suiter and his life, and all of the footage and information that was given to me, and listening to his voice, and you know what? Our work always, for me, it always can kind of come home a little bit, even though you'd like to put it away it always sort of seeps in somehow. you feel that sort of reverberated in the communities we're filming in. "The people that they've affected in these communities are the sort of silent part of this show...

“Can't fuck with Superman.” So says Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), on his way into a Baltimore Police Department building for what he believes will be a ...

You can get a ton of dramatic mileage out of “oops, we stumbled into a much bigger case than we thought” on a cop show, and so far We Own This City is all about “a much bigger case than we thought.” How big, and how far the show is willing to go to prosecute it, is an open question. Starting with The Wire, Simon opened a lot of eyes to the rank brutality, corruption, and racism of the War on Drugs, and for that he is to be commended. That look alone is enough to send the police commissioner (Delaney Williams) out of the room with a single, disgusted word: “Fuck.” There’s the rub, with the show and with Simon’s work as a whole. Look in his eyes as he sits in that interrogation room—“black eyes, like a doll’s eyes,” as Quint from Jaws would put it—and you’ll see nothing, nothing but deadly rage. They deal with a political establishment that has essentially thrown in the towel, a police force that refuses to do its nominal job now that it’s under scrutiny, and hyper-abusive cops like the infamous Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), who has the proverbial long-as-your-arm rap sheet but is still on the streets. Jon Bernthal is the star of the show, by every metric that the word “star” implies. (He bashes some poor guy’s head in over nothing at all in one of the episode’s more disturbing scenes, though another in which he humiliates a man in front of his kid for no reason is equally upsetting in its own way.) Can they achieve anything against those odds, with the threat of a Trump administration looming? Their only lead is a second tracking device Hawk discovers beneath the suspect’s car, one loaned out to a member of the Task Force. Rather than return it, McDougall opts to hang on to it, just in case. In one key sequence, he helps other cops raid a low-level dealer’s apartment, cleaning it out and pocketing the profits in cahoots with the guy’s former supplier. We Own This City Episode 1 opens with a sequence that cuts between his time as a beat cop, showing him effortlessly smashing a man’s bottle of booze just because he can, and his time as the head of a high-profile, high-powered BPD unit, lecturing fellow cops about when and when not to beat the shit out of people on the streets. “Can’t fuck with Superman.” So says Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), on his way into a Baltimore Police Department building for what he believes will be a fairly routine investigation by Internal Affairs into a banged up vehicle he failed to properly report.

The HBO drama We Own This City lifts the lid on the corruption of a Baltimore police department gone rogue. By Steven Ross. Tuesday, 26th April 2022, ...

David Corenswet plays David McDougall, an officer who helped to uncover corruption in the force. A deal between Sky and HBO allows Sky to broadcast HBO shows in the UK until 2024, and We Own This City is expected to be released on Sky Atlantic. Another disgraced member of the GTTF featured in the series is Momodu Gondo who was sentenced to ten years for crimes including racketeering conspiracy. McKinley Belcher III stars as Momodo Gondo, another officer sentenced for crimes relating to corruption. We Own This City is based on the nonfiction book of the same name published in 2021 by the Baltimore based journalist Justin Fenton. Many of the cast and crew from the Wire - a fictionalised series about the drug war in Baltimore - are involved in this true-crime story dramatisation.

Audiences are curious about former Baltimore police officer Wayne Jenkins after watching We Own This City on HBO. Who plays the character?

I did give drugs to Donny [Stepp, who testified he and Jenkins sold $1 million worth of narcotics] for the last couple of years I was police, but I didn’t take people’s money because then they would know you were dirty.” An investigation into the GTFF led to eight officers being charged for offences such as racketeering. Fortunately, HBO shows no signs of slowing and has already offered audiences some incredible titles to tuck into in 2022.

“If we lose the fights, we lose the streets,” says Sergeant Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) to a room full of eager fellow officers. He's talking about police ...

Part of that wide present-day context is the death of Freddie Gray, which led to protests – or “uprisings”, depending on who you ask – in Baltimore, the firing of the police commissioner, a huge drop in arrests and a spiking in crime, and a mayor who isn’t even running for re-election. Nicole, along with a new DOJ attorney named Ahmed (Ian Duff), is trying to clean up the streets one crooked cop at a time, starting with the worst of them – Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), a flagrantly corrupt officer who everyone knows is corrupt but has positioned himself in an almost untouchable position since he gets results. That leaves Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), an attorney with the Office of Civil Rights, in a bit of a predicament, since she has arrived in Baltimore eager to root out the corruption and now might not have an important ally she needs to do it. “Part One” introduces a couple of meaty subplots to get things going. “Part One” begins putting down the corner pieces of a complicated criminal mosaic that encompasses a couple of different timelines and cases, and the show isn’t too concerned about getting you acclimated. He’s giving a scene-stealing performance here in “Part One”, and his absence is felt any time he isn’t around.

HBO's new series from 'The Wire' creator David Simon deals with the crimes of the Baltimore Police Department Gun Trace Task Force.

George Pelecanos and David Simon's 'We Own This City' is a brilliant, blistering cop show about the corrosion of American law enforcement and America ...

Hector is astounding as a decent man and a good cop struggling with his own past in the department. We Own This City is all that in a shot glass, six fleet hours of simmering rage. The mystery of how all this happened is involving, even thrilling, and the cacophony-of-character approach offers multiple perspectives. Bernthal dominates the first episode, with flagrant facial hair and meowing Bodymore "oh"s. But City often pushes him to the background, approaching him from exterior perspectives which reveal ever-pettier motivations. The sequence is overwhelming, a symphony of pointless degradation. Conversely, City never forgets the victims of over-policing, following lost jobs and broken lives. The interrogation scenes offer standout moments for all the actors, though special credit to Darrell Britt-Gibson, who finds an unexpected note of bemusement at everything the department lets him get away with. We find out that it is almost impossible to build a jury of 12 Baltimore citizens because too many citizens have personally witnessed a police officer lie. The patient is dying, and they are us. There are a couple more detectives in a couple other counties. Jon Bernthal stars as Wayne Jenkins, the swagger-jacked poster boy for the Baltimore PD. He's a sergeant in the Gun Trace Task Force, a plain-clothes unit that gets weapons and drugs off the street. You realize Wayne and his pals are a symptom of a larger disease.