Jon Bernthal's 6-Episode Crime Thriller Is One of HBO’s Best Miniseries
Sign in to your Collider account
HBO's critically acclaimed miniseries, We Own This City, depicts one of the most staggering stories of police corruption in recent history. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and based on Justin Fenton's nonfiction book of the same name, We Own This City chronicles the rise and fall of the real-life (though now defunct) Gun Trace Task Force, headed by volatile cop Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal).
Developed by George Pelecanos and David Simon, best known for their work on The Wire, the HBO miniseries was lauded for its depiction of the widespread corruption and brutality plaguing the Baltimore City Police Department before and after the police killing of Freddie Gray — from unjustified and violent arrests and beatings to the theft of drugs, money, and personal property. These illegal activities are all enabled by the code of silence, or omertà, that implicitly governs the city police. We Own This City's frank portrayal of law enforcement corruption allows viewers to understand this silencing on a smaller scale.
'We Own This City' Explores Codes of Silence in Law Enforcement
We Own This City posits that the omertà functions from the top down. Mayors and state attorneys arrive in office eager to implement systemic change but prove incapable of staying the course, creating a pattern of inconsistent leadership, ever-shifting law enforcement protocols, and corruption. The strained relationship between the mayor and the "top brass" in the police department inevitably creates a conflict of interest. Because law enforcement officials are rightfully cynical about the political motivations of mayoral oversight, the police department effectively functions as an independent and untouchable entity at odds with the winds of change. Any objection to police tactics, no matter how ineffective, is therefore viewed as a threat to the department's autonomy. Speaking out against patterns of racism, brutality, and corruption within the department is perceived not only as an act of disloyalty against one's own colleagues, but against law enforcement in general.
By extension, Jenkins' superiors, under increasing pressure to drive down the crime rate, rationalize the Task Force's brazen behavior as an inevitable casualty of "getting drugs and guns off the street." The assumption that the benefits of careless or overzealous policing outweigh the costs allows figures like Jenkins to accrue power without the threat of accountability. Bizarrely, Bernthal's Jenkins becomes a poster boy for eradicating crime, and the greater his popularity, the more reckless he is. Acts of corruption are ignored under the larger goal of "fighting crime," an aspiration that comes to cover a multitude of sins. Only the threat of individual ruin –– the lengthy FBI investigation undertaken by Erika Jensen (Dagmara Dominczyk) and John Sieracki (Don Harvey) –– is enough to turn members of the Task Force against each other. Indeed, even though Jenkins' colleagues are increasingly horrified by their boss's actions –– including killing a bystander driver during an impulsive car chase, planting guns, posing as a federal agent, and skimming tens of thousands of dollars from drug seizures –– they initially refuse to speak out against him.
Jenkins' increasing indifference to the law, however blatant, has permitted Task Force members like Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), Momodu Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), and Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to reap huge financial rewards of their own, making "snitching" an unappealing option. The catch, though, is that not only do Task Force members steal from the people they arrest, beat, and interrogate; they steal from each other. It's their pursuit of personal profit that later enables formerly loyal operatives like Gondo and Rayam to give each other up during the FBI investigation. With their own futures called into question, it's every man for himself. Though Jenkins' wrath was previously enough to enforce the code of silence that binds these police officers, the possibility of prison eventually compels Gondo, Rayam, and other Task Force members to confess to their crimes.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Detective Should Solve Your Case? Columbo · Benoit Blanc · Jessica Fletcher · Marlowe
Answer eight quick questions and we will tell you who should be assigned to your murder. Four of the most famous detectives ever put on screen, and four completely different ways of getting somebody to admit what they did.
🕵Columbo(Columbo)
🧣Benoit Blanc(Knives Out)
🖨Jessica Fletcher(Murder, She Wrote)
🚬Philip Marlowe(The Big Sleep)
01
What do people assume about you when they meet you? Pick the one that sounds most like you.
02
Pick a coat. No wrong answers here.
03
How do you get information out of people? One answer only.
04
How would your friends describe you? Be honest.
05
Pick a drink. Pick the closest answer.
06
Where do you do your best thinking? Pick the closest answer.
07
What is your car like? Think about the one on your drive.
08
What makes you good at reading people? Last one. This is the one that decides it.
The Case Is Assigned Your Detective Is…
A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached, which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the case for them being the best in the business.
Columbo
You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man slowly realise he is in trouble.
- You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps working.
- The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered it since.
- Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
- Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.
Benoit Blanc
You are the most interesting person in the room and you know exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise talk to him.
- You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
- Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in 2020.
- Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
- Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point seriously.
Jessica Fletcher
Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.
- You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of information about everybody.
- Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won once.
- The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
- Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.
Philip Marlowe
You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed. Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.
- You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in the morning.
- Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to follow, which matters not at all.
- Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version says something about its decade.
- Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.
'We Own This City' Is One of HBO's Most Nuanced Miniseries
Though it's initially hard to fathom how lawless the Gun Trace Task Force became, We Own This City offers a nuanced view of how deeply embedded the code of silence was in the Baltimore City Police Department. The aversion to criticizing the department is so profound that, despite reams of evidence that his death was a homicide, many officers are infuriated by the state's attorney's decision to indict the police officers involved in the killing of Freddie Gray.
Gray's tragic end is an indicator of the dangers of such blind interpersonal loyalty in law enforcement, and it also reflects how easily Baltimore police officers, lacking accountability, slipped into criminality. With raw performances from a cast led by Bernthal, We Own This City unflinchingly portrays a story that needed to be told, making it not only one of HBO's best miniseries but also one of the best crime series of all time.
- Release Date
- 2022 - 2022-00-00
- Network
- HBO Max
- Directors
- Josh Charles
-
Sgt. Wayne Jenkins
-
Nicole Steele
-
Sean M. Suiter
-
Josh Charles
Daniel Hersl
Tells the story of the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption surrounding it.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.