But viewers soon learn the truth was very different, as the task force became a repository for officers who had a long list of complaints and problematic behavior in their history. In the series' first episode, Jenkins is shown giving a speech to new officers as head of the Gun Trace Task Force, telling them that brutality on the street only racks up complaints and negative attention and won't be tolerated in his unit. Bernthal excels at playing cocky, energetically physical guys with something to prove, so Jenkins – a former Marine seen as a rising star in the BPD – is in his sweet spot. In We Own This City, that dynamic is highlighted through the story of Wayne Jenkins – a star police officer played by The Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal, with a pretty solid Baltimore accent. Police trained to disregard official training "It's as if the guys who had learned the worst elements of police work from the drug war and had failed to learn how to police properly.they're the ones explaining to the next generation of guys who are now coming on how not to do the job," Simon added. "The guys involved in the task force.they weren't out of the academy when The Wire finished its run ," says Simon, himself a former police reporter for The Sun who saw his own books Homicide: Life on the Street and The Corner turned into TV shows interrogating the Baltimore police and drug addiction. He says We Own This City reveals the debilitating legacy from generations of pursuing a fruitless drug war with mass, indiscriminate arrests. Simon was already loosely connected to the book after reading Fenton's coverage of the task force scandal in The Baltimore Sun newspaper, he called the reporter to connect him with his book agent. You might say it's an evolution, but it's really a de-evolution." really is a coda to The Wire in the sense that it's Baltimore 15 years later. "Whereas The Wire.some of those folks were based on real people and the issues were real, but was fiction. "The story itself got us jacked up.and it is a completely fact-based dramatization," Pelecanos added, noting they stuck to what they could verify in creating scenes for We Own This City. With the new show, Simon also gets to say something else about the drug war and The Wire. In We Own This City, Pelecanos, Simon and many other Wire alums have reassembled to tell the true story of how an elite squad of Baltimore police officers called the Gun Trace Task Force began stealing money and drugs from criminals and – eventually – even law-abiding citizens. Simon created the show and brought in Pelecanos as a writer and producer, centering its story on a bold critique of the war on drugs - suggesting it had turned police into an occupying army that bullied black and brown residents in high-crime areas rather than protecting them. When it aired on HBO starting in 2002, The Wire spent five seasons exploring how a host of important institutions were failing a great American city - from labor and politics to education, the media and, of course, police. Watkins as writer.(Full disclosure: As the author of a piece for The BBC analyzing why critics chose The Wire as the best show of the 21st century so far, I am arguably one of those fans.) HBO alum Kary Antholis also serves as executive producer Bill Zorzi as writer/co-executive producer, and D. Noble as executive producer, and Ed Burns as writer/executive producer. They are joined by longtime collaborators Nina K. Pelecanos and Simon also serve as writers, along with director and executive producer Reinaldo Marcus Green. The cast includes Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead, Show Me a Hero), Josh Charles (The Good Wife, In Treatment), and Jamie Hector (BOSCH, The Wire), among many others. It examines the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work. Executive produced by George Pelecanos (The Deuce) and David Simon (The Wire) - and based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton - We Own This City is a six-hour, limited series chronicling the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force.
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