Yesterday (April 11th, 2022), Sky revealed a brand new trailer for an upcoming true-crime TV series that centres around the Baltimore Police Department and its struggles in the 2000s.
We Own This City is set to release in June this year (2022), and is both based on true events, and adapted from Justin Fenton’s book of the same name. The show is developed by The Wire creators David Simon and George Pelecanos.
The forthcoming show will detail the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), as well as the lawlessness and moral implosion that befell an American city, where the policies of drug prohibition and a large number of arrests were celebrated at the expense of genuine police work.
We Own This City stars Jon Bernthal (The Punisher, The Walking Dead), Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country), Jamie Hector (The Wire) and Josh Charles (The Good Wife).
The series will depict the Baltimore Police Department during their struggle, and the connection between We Own This City and The Wire will also be explored.
Despite The Wire (2002-2008) being a fictional tale, it still had a lot to say regarding the problems with policing that grew from the drug war heading into the turn of the century and the 2000s.
We Own This City, however, tackles the next generation of the drug war, and the implications of this in the future.
Within the 2000s, The Baltimore Police had great difficulty responding to crime with police work that actually meant something, giving the department over to mass arrests and drug warring instead.
We Own This City aims to show just how the department’s desperate reliance on numbers over physical merits eventually led to the department not being able to supervise the GTTF, as well as the inability of the department to bring rogue police back in line.
When the GTTF scandal occurred in 2017, despite the many indications that corruption had hold of many plainclothes units going back almost 10 years, Baltimore police commanders still believed that any street units that could bring in both guns and drugs on a regular basis must be celebrated and protected.
We Own This City will debut exclusively on NOW and Sky Atlantic in June, 2022.
Written by Melissa, who you can follow on Twitter @melissajournal
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Tagged in The Wire Jon Bernthal True Crime Sky Atlantic