David Simon and George Pelecanos Call ‘We Own This City’ a “Coda” for ‘The Wire’

“When you have to fight, you have to win…if we lose the fights, we lose the streets.” This is what Officer Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) tells a room of rookie cops in the opening montage of HBO‘s new crime drama We Own This City. It’s his way of justifying a whole score of sins, including (but not limited to) police brutality, racial profiling, and outright theft. It’s also his way of convincing the acolytes hanging on his every word that they are right, and might makes that right.

HBO’s brutal new crime drama We Own This City takes a look at the rise and fall of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, or the GTTF through surprisingly intimate portrayals of the real people caught in the center of the scandal. The series is based on journalist Justin Fenton’s non-fiction book of the same name and has been produced by two of the crime genre’s all-time greats: George Pelecanos and David Simon. The duo previously tackled the twin monsters of crime and police corruption in the HBO masterpiece, The Wire. While We Own This City casts many familiar faces from that show in very new roles, it is a story that stands on its own. It’s a devastating six episode limited series that will leave you feeling raw, even if it ends with a whole bunch of bad guys behind bars.

So what brought George Pelecanos and David Simon together on this project? The duo has worked together on other HBO shows Treme and The Deuce, but We Own This City would bring them back to the streets of Baltimore. So why this project and why was now the time to go back to the stomping grounds of The Wire?

“You know, it came to us,” George Pelecanos told Decider. “We never even really talked about, ‘Let’s do something else in Baltimore with crime and the police and so on.’ But David was aware of the story before I was. He actually got — Justin Fenton was The [Baltimore] Sun reporter — he helped him get a book deal for this, but then David didn’t take it any further.”

Pelecanos said, “Somebody from HBO called me and said, ‘Would you like to adapt this for a mini-series?’ And after I read the manuscript, I said, ‘Well, I will, but on the condition that I can bring in David Simon and our other partner, Nina Noble, and some writers from The Wire,‘ because I thought it’s good karma to bring everybody back together to revisit the city as we did 20 years ago.”

While The Wire was a sweeping opera showing the interconnection between law enforcement, the drug trade, ports, politics, and journalism, We Own This City looks at a very specific group of corrupt cops. In 2017, eight Baltimore Police Officers who worked in the GTTF were accused of using their positions to shakedown civilians for cash, falsifying police records, and scamming their way to outsized overtime paychecks. They were all found guilty. We Own This City looks at these crimes, primarily through the story of the group’s ringleader, Wayne Jenkins. Other prominent members of the group, including Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Momodu “G Money” Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), are also heavily featured in the series, but the focus is on Wayne Jenkins. David Simon explained to Decider that they seized upon Jenkins as their primary character because he had the “longest chronology” to cover.

“You know, most of these cops were not cops until, until the late aughts. They were younger. He came on in 2003. And so he had a little bit more of a journey and that helped,” Simon said. “But also, you know, he was in the end, probably the brashest, most self-aggrandized, self-confident creature that the system created. I mean, he just thought he could do anything. Which is probably what helped get him caught, but, you know, cause he almost damn sure could.”

“Yeah, and he didn’t spill either,” Pelecanos said. “He got the longest sentence ’cause he didn’t talk, which is kind of interesting.”

Even though We Own This City looks at police corruption in the aftermath of the Killing of Freddie Gray, Pelecanos and Simon included a variety of cop characters who are either attempting to do good or simply do. We learn that a young protege of Jenkins nicknamed “K-Stop” disappointed his mentor by turning out to be straight. Elsewhere, two narcotics officers, played by David Corenswet and Larry Mitchell, manage to suss out some of the GTTF’s crimes while on their own investigation.

David Simon told Decider that it was important that We Own This City show this spectrum of morality within the police force because “the truth is that law enforcement runs the spectrum. So does the street for that matter. Everyone starts on the human scale somewhere.”

“If you live by the mantra that, ‘ACAB,’ all cops are bastards, or you live by the mantra of Back the Blue, you’re probably not going to be particularly satisfied with some parts of this mini-series,” Simon said. “And you’re probably not going to be particularly useful to ever solving any of the real problems because all cops aren’t bastards. You can’t always Back the Blue. It comes down to a very fundamental need to address the system and what has happened with law enforcement. And what’s happened with the drug war and mass incarceration.”

“You know, we lost our way. About 40, 50 years ago, we started emphasizing the wrong things and judging police work by the wrong metrics. Baltimore and the Gun Trace Task Force is the coda,” Simon said. “We started arguing these things in The Wire years ago, but things have reached a pass and ultimately some of the characters we depicted in The Wire who were already off the rails, but they weren’t dragging the whole department with them — you know, the Hersls and Carvers of The Wire — they’re now the Colonels and the Majors. And they’re now training the lieutenants in the story in how not to do police work the right way.”

“So the institutional memory of a lot of these agencies has now become lock everybody up, put dope and guns on the table and turn the other way when things get dirty instead of doing actual police,” Simon said. “That’s what happened in Baltimore.”

We Own This City’s plot doesn’t move in linear order, but hops back and forth in time so we can see the cause and effect of the GTTF’s crimes. Many of the show’s biggest time jumps are anchored by reports telling us where and when Wayne Jenkins is during a given scene. Pelecanos and Simon admitted they were worried about this risky way of plotting the series, but Simon said, “If we went linearly, it becomes just a story of here are these bad cops and we’re going to catch them.”

“We really wanted it to be about the why. Why did this situation come to the place it did? How did these people come about? And what does it mean that they came about in this way? The why of the piece needed the reflection back and forth,” Simon said. “And so, yeah, we put a lot of work in the back.”

We Own This City is sure to challenge, enrage, and haunt viewers as it takes us through a cesspool of corruption in one American city. The thing is that one city represents a larger, societal ill.

“The mission has to change. That’s the problem,” Pelecanos said. “Until it does, you know, the result will be continued to be the same and violent crime will continue to be perpetuated. People want safe streets and they want constitutional policing.”

“I think there’s a lot of argument as to whether or not inner city neighborhoods, people of color are being over-policed or under-policed in America. And the answer is both,” Simon said. “They’re being over-policed brutally, on that which shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t be the mission. And where they really need policing, where they need a police presence, where they need police to respond, where people are hurt and lives are being damaged, they’re routinely under-policed. And that’s a function of mission.”

“There’s a lot of slogans that get you nowhere. What has to happen is people have to get into the gristle of the thing, the maw of the thing, just to start to work the actual problem,” Simon said. “And that’s hard.”

We Own This City premieres tonight at 9 PM ET on HBO and HBO Max.