What Should Police Reform Look Like?Įxactly what kind of police reform we should pursue is a controversial question, even for the showrunners. It is mostly good dramatic television, and it allows Simon to insert his voice into the recent spate of police controversies, an opportunity he uses to accurately depict the severity of the crisis while continuing to champion reform. Still, We Own This City is overall a success. While well-acted, the expository nature of the show - its plot largely driven by FBI and DOJ interviews - does not lend itself to multidimensional character development, to say nothing of the occasional levity that lifted The Wire out of its self-imposed gloom.
#DAVID SIMON WE OWN THIS CITY SERIES#
We Own This City is a much more streamlined series that at times feels like an overlong documentary on police misconduct. The Wire’s character development and multifaceted analysis of Baltimore, beyond a narrow focus on the police, makes it the more engrossing of the two shows. We Own This City follows the massive protests of 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd as a kind of rumination on how urban policing ended up where it did. The public is much more aware of (and visibly outraged by) police misconduct. We Own This City is released into a context that is strikingly different from the one in which The Wire aired.
Unlike The Wire, We Own This City’s plot is pulled directly from real-life events, and the show’s gritty portrayal of urban policing in the 2010s mirrors what the public has seen consistently in recent years regarding police violence and its aftermath. When the public’s reaction to Gray’s murder intensifies and it becomes clear that new police chief, Kevin Davis, is willing to accept a consent decree, officers in Baltimore protest by not leaving their vehicles or making arrests as crime skyrockets. Steele and the FBI agents investigating Jenkins serve as stand-ins for the audience as we uncover the magnitude of malfeasance in Baltimore Mosaku’s performance is terrific as her shock turns to outrage.
Wunmi Mosaku plays Nicole Steele, a civil rights attorney working for the Department of Justice as it pursues a consent decree to reform policing in Baltimore. Gray’s death in police custody sparked enormous protests throughout Baltimore, part of a nationwide uprising over police violence that began with events in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is investigating Baltimore police after the killing of Gray the year prior. Set in 2016, the show flashes back to Jenkins’s brazen displays of illegality as members of his unit are interviewed by the FBI. The show also delves into the crisis Jenkins’s unit created as it pillaged the city’s overtime fund, lying about hours worked and cashing obscene checks that warped the department’s budget. Jenkins, in a captivating performance by Jon Bernthal, leads his unit in an ever-escalating series of unconstitutional incidents: stealing money and drugs from crime scenes, planting evidence, and assaulting Baltimore residents. Simon retains his penchant for unflinching portrayals of modern policing: the degree to which Jenkins’s unit, as portrayed in the series, breaks the law and terrorizes African-American residents of Baltimore is stomach-turning. Simon’s new show follows the true story of the corrupt Gun Trace Task Force headed by rogue officer Wayne Jenkins. If there was any hope for viewers of The Wire that progress had been made in urban policing in light of that show’s popularity and changes in the discourse surrounding criminal justice in the last twenty years, We Own This City is here to break the news that circumstances have only gotten worse. We Own This City paints a devastating portrait of Baltimore police. By contrast, Simon’s new show is a taut six-episode series that focuses exclusively on the troubled state of Baltimore policing in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015. While The Wire always had Baltimore police as a focal point, the sprawling show also touched on urban crises ranging from deindustrialization to under-resourced public schools to the decline of traditional media, all over the course of five sensational seasons. To mark the twentieth anniversary of The Wire, creator David Simon, his creative partner Ed Burns, and writer George Pelecanos have returned with We Own This City, another HBO show set in Baltimore.
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