We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City

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The guys involved in the task force...they weren't out of the academy when The Wire finished its run [in 2008]," says Simon, himself a former police reporter for The Sun who saw his own books Homicide: Life on the Street and The Corner turned into TV shows interrogating the Baltimore police and drug addiction. Bringing Jenkins and his ilk to justice does not mean Baltimore’s problems are resolved. As of late March, 76 people had been murdered so far this year, up from 65 over the same period in 2021. Another 156 people had been injured in shootings, up from 115 in the corresponding period. The city had also recorded 714 robberies, an increase of almost 25%. I fought this war,” Treat Williams, playing a retired detective, tells Steele regarding the drug war. “It was lost when I got there. And I did nothing but lose in my time.” Which of course it eventually did. The GTTF guys got caught by chance; a federal investigation began; and the gang was busted. Most of them are currently doing time, and those who aren't in prison are at least not cops anymore. The worst, saddest bit of this, though, is a family who lost a husband and a father, under circumstances that remain mysterious, a death that remains an unsolved homicide -- at least in the files of BPD. Justin Fenton, a crime and courts reporter with the Baltimore Sun, meticulously lays out these harrowing details and much more in his gripping, must-read book, We Own this City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption. Fenton brings to this book years of experience reporting on police accountability in Baltimore. He has provided in-depth reporting on the BPD, including its interactions and relationships with hard-pressed communities in Baltimore.

Jamie Hector, who played ruthless drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, surfaces on We Own This City as Sean Suiter, an officer who finds it difficult to move on after serving on the Task Force. Delaney Williams, who played sarcastic homicide squad supervisor Jay Landsman on The Wire, is Baltimore's beleaguered police commissioner on the new show.Fenton, who reported on the trial, recalls: “Through the people cooperating and telling the truth, we gained a new level of understanding of how these things work that I don’t think we’ve had previously. They told us not just what they did but how and that was very eye-opening testimony. It’s like someone describing how they first stole money. The DOJ report came shortly after Gray’s killing sparked an uprising in the city and throughout the U.S. decrying police brutality and racial discrimination. And when the GTTF’s actions were publicized a year later, trust between the BPD and the communities they policed was already severely fractured. In We Own This City, Justin Fenton has produced a work of journalism that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit, but can stand as the inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war.' David Simon

United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department, Aug. 10, 2016 A] searing look at [Baltimore's] recent police corruption scandal...Fans of TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire based on journalist David Simon's groundbreaking coverage of Baltimore will be engrossed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore. Photograph: HBO Jenkins duly tested his colleagues’ willingness to put personal loyalty to him above their oaths to uphold the law. Det James Kostoplis testified that, soon after joining the GTTF, he was asked by Jenkins to go for a ride. They drove a short distance to a side street where Jenkins told Kostoplis to leave his phone and equipment in the van and get out.A remarkable story about the real-life collision of corruption, criminality, and racial profiling. Justin Fenton tells a well-written, wrenching narrative about a dark chapter in not only Baltimore’s history but in the legacy of disconnect between American citizens and those who are sworn to protect and serve them. This book is a must-read.” —Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore and Five Days

You take that and you multiply it by a large number of officers who get captured by that culture and what you get is the gun trace task force.” We Own This City” doesn’t reach the level that “The Wire” did. Yet in terms of bringing a sharp dramatic eye to big-city policing, Simon and company pretty much own this genre.

We Own This City

We Own This City starts out slowly, but after gaining its hold, the book unfolds like a relentless, well-crafted fictional police procedural. Only this time, the police are the villains and this is a true story. Fenton is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and he's had a front-row seat for the tragedies played out on the streets of Baltimore. He reported on the uprising after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody; his byline appeared on stories about some of the arrests and trials recounted in the book; and he's acquainted with plenty of the principals of the events in the book and with the culture in the city and in the infrastructure of the police department that made those events possible, if not inevitable.