In 2015, Freddie Gray died in police custody at a Baltimore hospital with a severed spine. In 2014, the Baltimore Sun unearthed and revealed that in the preceding three years, the City of Baltimore paid out $5.7 million in court judgments and settlements of over 100 lawsuits brought by city residents for police brutality and false arrests. To understate the tragically obvious, the last seven years have been horrific for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), and worse for the individuals and communities in Baltimore whom the BPD has victimized and traumatized. In a city once described as “a poster child for the basic failure to stop lawlessness”, another character explains: “If we’re going to police the right way, we’re not going to police at all.We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption “Hersl and guys like him – they get out of their cars and they make arrests,” comes the answer. A prosecutor asks why the most sadistic officer, Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles) is still working despite a record of violence against suspects. The show is most successful in explaining why this unit was allowed to get away with it for so long. Perhaps feeling the need to complicate this straightforward job, Simon and Pelecanos play with the timelines, cutting between the years in a way that feels unnecessarily confusing.

The Wire was often referred to as being Dickensian in detail and scope, whereas We Own This City focuses on one story and boils the characters down to their essence. So the subject matter is dramatically engaging, but the confines of a six-episode series do the show no favours. The task force gets results – guns off the streets and out of the hands of drug dealers – and Jenkins cultivates a rock star aura. At the centre of episode one is an attention-grabbing performance from Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins, all swaggering machismo.

It’s a blunt way of showing that the cops are the bad guys here. In the opening episode, a uniformed officer smashes a bottle out of an old guy’s hand. Think of it as a companion piece, although it bears more resemblance to The Shield. We are in the same territory covered by The Wire, and We Own This City is by screenwriter David Simon (so too The Wire and again in collaboration with George Pelecanos here). Journalist Justin Fenton chronicled their rise and fall in the book on which this series is based our review said that it made The Wire “look tame by comparison”. Its officers considered themselves untouchable. Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force was a police unit mired in corruption. It helps to know that We Own This City (Sky Atlantic) is based on a true story.

Justin fenton we own this city review