This series may not change the game. Ultimately, the journey reveals how theculture of corruption within the ranks of the Baltimore police forcecontributed to the destruction of the publics trust and impacted the police departments ability to solve a shooting deathof one of its own. He and members of the GTTF framed the two men that Jenkins had been pursuing by planting drug evidence. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Next June it will be 20 years since The Wire began its sprawling Dickensian portrait of Baltimore, Maryland, as a proxy for the decline and fall of the American empire. Bernthal (recently of the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark) makes a convincing baby gangster, arrogant and petulant, growing sloppier and greedier. They were veritable gangsters, and the fact that Suiter died in this puzzling manner a mere day before he was speaking to the feds about his shady colleagues raised immediate suspicions that he was actually the victim of an orchestrated hit. You know, I think we're already, across the country, not trusting our law enforcement. Ultimately, the journey reveals how theculture of corruption within the ranks of the Baltimore police forcecontributed to the destruction of the publics trust and impacted the police departments ability to solve a shooting deathof one of its own. Officers tell me that its a new day over there and everybodys wearing body cameras all the time, which wasnt the case until pretty late in the investigation of the gun trace taskforce. Im not sure the police have proven that.. When we spoke recently, I asked what drew her to Detective Suiter's case. At the center of it all lies a fallen officer and the complexities of life in one of the most investigated police departments in the country, where impropriety appears to penetrate a broken system at every level. They are joined by longtime collaborators Nina K. Noble as executive producer, and Ed Burns as writer/executive producer. An independent review board ruled that the 43-year-old detective had in fact shot himself a finding that his family and others vehemently reject. Suiter died just a day before he was due to testify before a federal grand jury investigating an elite Baltimore police unit, part of one of the worst law enforcement corruption cases in recent US history. NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with director and actor Sonja Sohn about her new film, The Slow Hustle. We glimpse Steeles motives when she recalls her brothers being racially profiled by police. English, Italy Im sure those who are involved in policy making are in the midst of looking at how to develop a more nuanced strategy on some other levels because the folks who are in opposition are playing serious chess right now. It tells how a shift in policing strategy in 2007 led to the creation of the GTTF amid concern that police had spent too long pursuing drugs rather than guns. See the full list of We Own This Citycast and charactershere. But at the same time, this was a police officer. 2023 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. French You were filming as this was all playing out in real time. She grew up in Newport News, Virginia, had a stint in New York as a slam poet and recorded an album in London. Fenton has spoken to many people in Jenkins orbit and made multiple attempts to contact Jenkins in prison but without success. And I have about as much hope that his death will be solved as I do the rest of them. In a war, you have enemies. D Watkins, a local journalist and author who shares the view that Suiters death could have been an inside job, says in the film: What developed for me out of the whole story is this whole idea of Black lives really dont matter. English, Japan ReBUILD Metro is a community change organization that revitalizes historically redlined neighborhoods of East Baltimore without displacing their legacy residents. But the character functions mostly to deliver exposition and make, or receive, the shows arguments. EN. One thing that we all knew is that there were way too many details in this case that were conflicting. Having thus stipulated, it would also be absurd to pretend not to notice the connection. The conflicting theories on his death speak to stark divisions between the involved parties an independent review board ruled his death a suicide, a theory that the Suiter family strongly resists. The two men were sent to prison for crimes they did not commit. By what name was The Slow Hustle (2021) officially released in Canada in English? Last. And in a war, you need warriors. In July of 2022, the lead investigator into Sean Suiter's death, Sgt James Lloyd was sentenced to one year in jail for using his fellow policemen to harass a contractor working on his home. Rayam opens up about the GTTF. So to me, that was a microcosm of the macrocosm. Spanish, Brazil HBO Documentary Films presents A Blowback Production THE SLOW HUSTLE director and producer, Sonja Sohn; executive producers, Marc Levin, Kary Antholis, Sonja Sohn; supervising producer, Daphne Pinkerson; producer, Mahrya MacIntire. And I think that's quite a journey that we're all on here, you know, in this country. Start from the beginning and watch the first episode ofWe Own This Cityfor free. English, Malaysia Baltimore's largest police corruption scandal is in the national spotlight with a new HBO drama. In January, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh fired her police commissioner and replaced him with former Deputy Commissioner Darryl De Sousa, who promised sweeping reforms to the department. New Study: DC Is One of the Worst Cities for Decent-Size, Affordable Apartments, Baltimore Could Be DCs Hottest New Suburb, Lil Uzi Vert and Ice Spice Will Perform at This Years Broccoli City Festival, Rant About the Books You Hate at This Book Club on H Street, An Ex-Oath Keepers New Book Gives an Inside Look at the Far-Right Militia Involved in January 6, Trucker Convoys Began to Fail Their Way Around DC One Year Ago. Jenkins name appears in the opening shot of We Own This City, an HBO drama that chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore police departments gun trace taskforce (GTTF), described in an independent report as the most shocking corruption scandal in Baltimores history. Along the way, though, you got a lot of rich personal stories to invest in, which is how dramas with a broad social scope manage to succeed as both art and argument. Many residents in the city, especially in Black communities, just don't trust the. This low profile helped insulate the GTTF from public scrutiny and allowed it go rogue. But this type of casual everyday lying, stealing, misrepresenting information, in some cases framing people its hard to prove and for that reason it often went unaddressed., The misconduct continued despite the outcry over Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died of neck injuries suffered in police custody in April 2015. We Own This City does not do much to explain Jenkins or complicate his villainy, but it is insightful about how a bad cop learns to be bad more effectively (and how he makes his colleagues worse). United States 5 Takeaways From ESPNs (Newest) Bombshell Dan Snyder Report, The Bidens Went to Dinner and Ordered the Same Dish, Dividing the Internet, PHOTOS: 2023 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize Honoree Dinner Celebrating Joni Mitchell, Cherry Blossom Peak Bloom Is Predicted for March 22-25. So the federal investigation that eventually brought Jenkins and some of his cronies to justice is no spoiler. With Bomenka around the corner, Suiter approached this figure, shots rang out, and Bomenka raced to the scene, whereas frantic bodycam footage illustrateshe found Suiter lying dead from a gunshot wound to the head. English, Poland In practice, theyre all about that brutality and then some. What you might miss is the vivid human tapestry that brings this kind of institutional analysis to life on the screen and keeps it alive in your memory. Sonja Sohn, who played Baltimore cop Kima Greggs onThe Wire and who founded a Baltimore-based nonprofit, directs the film. With no reliable eyewitnesses to the crime, a harried if largely clueless search ensued, most of it predicated on a generic description of a Black man in a dark jacket with a white stripe. THE SLOW HUSTLE is included in a collection of four gripping documentary titles that debut on Tuesdays, beginning November 23. The film follows Suiters family as it tries to get answers about his death. English, Portugal You know, it took a minute to gain their trust. We Own This City instead works as a kind of appendix, an updated extra for Simon and Pelecanoss existing, well-earned fan base. English, Belgium As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. This beautiful family who is patient and has faith in them, they really dont care. English, Hong Kong Eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) were being investigated for a wide range of offenses, including shaking down citizens, filing false paperwork, committing civil rights violations, and making fraudulent overtime claimsas well as rolling around town in unmarked cars while wearing black hockey masks, robbing drug dealers of their narcotics and cash, and then planting evidence on them to send them up the river. A detective in a nearby county traces a string of overdoses to Baltimore. We Own This City Review: Baltimore Police Problems, Rewired, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/arts/television/we-own-this-city-review.html. A far-reaching corruption scandal is the last thing Baltimore's troubled police department needs. HBO doc The Slow Hustle examines the mysterious death of Baltimore cop Sean Suiter, who was set to testify against police corruption and then was found with a bullet in the head. As new evidence emerges, the mystery deepens. He enjoyed the admiration and respect of his superiors and was given special privileges. The Seven Five, also known as Seven Five Precinct, is a 2014 documentary directed by Tiller Russell, and produced by Eli Holzman, Aaron Saidman, and Sheldon Yellen.The film looks at police corruption in the 75th precinct of the New York Police Department during the 1980s. Portuguese, Brazil, Chile So there was something different. The corruption and civic woes the show details, as in much of Simons work (Treme, The Deuce), are systemic. David Simon returns to a familiar beat for HBO, updating if not improving on an old critique. Jenkins brings Suiter along on a raid. Like, even if youre a police officer, they really dont.. His elite unit came to be seen by senior commanders as a bulwark against chaos. Funding social structures that support the people is just a given. Det James Kostoplis testified that, soon after joining the GTTF, he was asked by Jenkins to go for a ride. Im not victimising real people if I steal some of their ill-gotten gains, so if I go into their homes and I find $100,000, Ill take $20,000 of it and nobody will be the wiser because these are people who are compromised and theyre not going to complain and, if they do complain, nobodys going to believe them because theyve got criminal records., 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 airs on Mondays on HBO in the US, on Binge and Foxtel Now in Australia, and in the UK at a later date, The Wires Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: We are seeing multilayered corruption, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Jenkins then asked Kostoplis what he thought about investigating a high-level drug dealer, determining where he kept his money and stealing it. And I used the investigative journalists and their journalistic ethics and expertise first and foremost as, I guess, the first sort of filter and sieve through the facts. So that's sort of like the sieve through which the rumors come through. Or was he an accomplice, on the take just like his boys-in-blue brethren? You may know her for her role as a Baltimore police detective in the hit series "The Wire." 2023 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Suiter, it turned out, wasnt just some nondescript detective; he was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury about his fellow officers corruption the following day. I dont think were losing momentum. In HBOs We Own This City, Jon Bernthal plays Sgt. Coming to the city was was kind of a reckoning with my own self. Through media arts education, Wide Angle Youth Media cultivates and amplifies the voices of Baltimore youth to engage audiences across generational, cultural, and social divides. Like many series right now, this one is using a nonfiction story to approximate the power of fictional drama. Sean!) in an alley in West Baltimore, an area notorious for poverty, segregation and violent crime. And so being able to make that connection, I think, to those other cases was in the back of my mind. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. See production, box office & company info, Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall, Bad tidings in the Baltimore Police Department. On Nov. 15, 2017, Suiter was accompanying his rookie partner David Bomenka on an assignment when he allegedly spotted a suspicious figure in an alleyway in the citys Harlem Park neighborhood. The true story of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force. While the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, after a rough ride in a police van, is not depicted, it hangs over everything here, from Black Baltimoreans mistrust of the police to the post-Gray work slowdown by officers. FLORIDO: Your film really does document the Baltimore Police Department's long history of corruption. Obvious answers werent forthcoming, but many came to think that if the latter were true, Suiter might not have been murdered at all; rather, he could have committed suicide, and staged it to look like a homicide so that his family would receive his full post-mortem benefits. There are other theories. That case gives the series its shape and through-line, but also a relentless, repetitive structure. HBO alum Kary Antholis also serves as executive producer; Bill Zorzi as writer/co-executive producer, and D. Watkins as writer. The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore, especially communities of colour. The corruption has cost Baltimore taxpayers more than $13 million in settlements with victims and hundreds of cases the corrupt officers worked on had to be thrown out. I was asked by an HBO executive if I was interested in pursuing this topic, if maybe there was a certain kind of perspective or access that I had to offer. Pelecanos and Simon also serve as writers. It also tracks several local journalists, including Baltimore Sunreporter Justin Fenton andSalon editor-at-large D. Watkins, while they parse the investigation into Suiters death to its official andto many, including Suiters familyunsatisfying conclusion. The documentary focuses on Michael Dowd, a former police officer of 10 years, who was arrested in 1992, leading to one of . It wasnt that we heard about them all the time. Spanish, Colombia This emphasis on numbers and quantity over quality really had a corrosive effect on the police department and influenced the conduct of officers.