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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