We Own This City chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force.
Developed by George Pelecanos and David Simon, and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, the drama shows 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.
Starring Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead), Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country), Jamie Hector (The Wire) and Josh Charles (The Good Wife), We Own This City depicts the Baltimore Police Department, the connective tissue between the shows goes beyond the creative teams and the city of Baltimore. While “The Wire” was a fictional story, it was speaking to the issues in policing stemming from the drug war heading into the turn of the century and the 2000s. The drama also deals with the next generation of the drug war.
In the 2000s, the Baltimore Police Department struggled to respond to crime with meaningful police work, giving itself over to mass arrest and drug warring instead. WE OWN THIS CITY shows how the department’s desperate reliance on statistics over substance eventually led to the inability of department officials to supervise the Gun Trace Task Force and the further inability of the department to discipline rogue police.
At the time of the GTTF scandal in 2017, though there were numerous indications of corruption within several plainclothes units going back almost a decade, Baltimore police commanders held to the belief that any street unit that could bring in guns and drugs consistently had to be championed and protected. Episodes depict the inevitable corruption of a unit given this carte blanche.
We Own This City will be available exclusively on Sky Atlantic and NOW from June 2022.
