Simon, Pelecanos, and the rest of the “We Own the City” writing staff structure various sections of this story around specific police actions linked by theme rather than time.
In this show’s depiction, Jenkins and many other members of the GTTF lorded over their chosen areas of the city like a band of roving oligarchs, seizing money and weapons regardless of how dubious the pretext. Instead, anyone who commits to these six hours is put in the shoes of a detective, presented with disparate fragments of a department-wide whole and being guided along the path to piece them together. Viewers aren’t being automatically aligned with dirty cops who came upon a preexisting crater of professional misconduct and grabbed shovels to dig even deeper. But it’s telling that “We Own This City” instead takes a more circuitous, non-linear approach. It would be simple for series creators David Simon and George Pelecanos to present their adaptation of Justin Fenton’s book as a six-episode origin story of a mistake, to track Sergeant Wayne Jenkins ( Jon Bernthal) from his early days onward, as he ascends the ranks of the BPD and assumes the top post at the GTTF.
Particularly in a dramatic retelling, leading up to the 2017 arrests and eventual prosecutions of multiple members of the specialized plainclothes police division, “ We Own This City” is careful about who gets the lion’s share of the attention and when they get it. When depicting corruption and malpractice on a wide scale, as perpetrated by members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, there’s a key question of framing.
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