What’s the Story Behind HBO’s ‘We Own This City’?

David Simon made a name for himself covering Baltimore crime, first on the page as a Baltimore Sun reporter and then on the TV screen as a creator of the acclaimed HBO drama The Wire. Simon has set his recent TV shows in other locales, but a real-life scandal in Baltimore’s police force brought his creative energy back to his longtime home. And thus we have We Own This City, a six-episode series premiering on HBO on Monday, April 25.

So what is that scandal? According to CBS Baltimore, eight officers of the Baltimore Police Department’s now-disbanded Gun Trace Task Force have been convicted of racketeering, armed robbery, selling drugs, making false overtime claims, and planting evidence on suspects.

In March 2017, federal prosecutors indicted seven from the unit: Wayne Jenkins, Momodu Gondo, Evodio Hendrix, Daniel Hersl, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and Maurice Ward. A subsequent indictment looped their colleague Thomas Allers into the racketeering conspiracy.

The initial indictment accused three of the officers of stealing $1,500 from a nursing home employee they had searched without a warrant, according to the Associated Press. It accused five of the officers of stealing $2,000 from a man leaving a storage facility. And it accused four of the officers of turning in only $15,000 from a total of $21,500 confiscated during a traffic stop.

“This is not about aggressive policing, it is about criminal conspiracy,” then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein said at the time. Kevin Davis, then Baltimore’s police commissioner, spoke more bluntly, saying, “These officers are 1930s-style gangsters.”

By June 2019, all eight of those men had been sentenced to prison. Ward and Hendrix received the lightest sentences, getting seven years in prison, and they were both released two years earlier this February, per the Sun. Jenkins, whom Jon Bernthal is playing in the series, received the heaviest sentence, punished with a 25-year stint behind bars.

And the scandal keeps expanding. Earlier this month, former Baltimore Police Detective Robert Hankard was found guilty of corruption and conspiracy charges, following prosecution that originated in the Gun Trace Task Force investigation, according to the Sun.

In January, former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Bromwich and other independent investigators released a 515-page report covering 20 years of history around the Gun Trace Task Force scandal. That report showed that Baltimore Police leadership turned a blind eye to officers with high rates of arrests and seizures, per CBS Baltimore.

At the time of the report, a total of 13 defendants had been charged in the scandal. “These former BPD officers constituted not a single criminal gang, but instead a shifting constellation of corrupt officers who discovered each other during the course of their careers and committed their crimes individually, in small groups, and then in larger groups,” the report authors wrote.

Justin Fenton, who covered the scandal as a crime writer for the Sun, turned his reporting into a 2021 book, We Own This City, with help from Simon.

“I read the stories contemporaneously that Justin Fenton was writing — he had my old gig at the Sun at the time — and I thought, ‘There’s a book in here,’” Simon recently told The Hollywood Reporter. And so I actually called Justin and I hooked him up with my book agent. And I said, “We’ve reached a level of dystopia in the drug war that is fresh, and this scandal, it has legs and it’s got to be written.”

Then an HBO executive sent that manuscript to George Pelecanos, one of Simon’s colleagues from The Wire, and the two men got to work adapting Fenton’s book for the screen. “On the surface, this is about the [rise and fall] of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force,” Pelecanos previously told TV Insider. “But David and I saw it as a way to talk about policing in general and where it’s going wrong with regard to the drug war. The story and the players are real.”

We Own This City, Series Premiere, Monday, April 25, 9/8c, HBO