HBO’s We Own This City can’t solve the problem of policing

polygon.com:

“Most police worth their shit, they can write their way out of anything,” Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) smirks to a room of cadets in creators David Simon and George Pelecanos’ HBO crime series We Own This City.

It’s nearly played as a throwaway line by Bernthal, a dash that compounds a montage taking viewers through the systematic inequality and state-sponsored terrorism in Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore city police harassing young Black men, the extralegal courts sentencing African Americans to harsh sentences, and the dehumanized Black men standing, petrified, in prison. In the six-episode limited series directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), Bernthal’s line explains the root of the problem and establishes the actor as the lone pulse in a dull and deliberate series that puts the system on trial but has little time for the people.

We Own This City is a ruminative show with a multitude of moving parts — too many, in fact. Justin Fenton’s nonfiction novel of the same name, adapted by Simon and Pelecanos (The Wire), is set in a city still reeling from the 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent uprising it spawned. See, ever since Gray’s death, crime is high and the arrests are low because cops are unwilling to leave their cars for fear their “good” policing will be mistaken for bad (what constitutes “good” policing is never wholly explained in the series). It’s left everyone on edge, still searching for answers.

The nonlinear narrative — spanning 2003 to 2017 and told mostly through Jenkins’ eyes, the nearest the series has to a main character — tracks four seemingly separate investigations. The first begins in 2015, with Detectives McDougall (David Corenswet) and Kilpatrick (Larry Mitchell)