1 Season | 6 Episodes | TV-MA WATCH NOW 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. HBOs We Own This City Production team is proud to be working with many local Baltimore non-profits to create positive change in the communities where we filmed. Includes: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo - Brazzaville, Congo - Kinshasa, Cte d'Ivoire, Djibouti . As Nicole Steele, a civil-rights-division attorney, Wunmi Mosaku does all she can to create a character who feels her mission deeply and who chafes at her departments resistance to real change. How did you, as a filmmaker, you know, distinguish between fact and rumor? Whatever happened to the cast? The Slow Hustle, which debuts Tuesday night on HBO and HBOMax, looks at the death of Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter, who lived in Prince Georges County and who was shot in the head in late 2017, the day before he was due to testify in a federal probe of police corruption. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. And the rumors start to tear Baltimore apart. He was praised as a positive role model. A few days earlier, the 35-year-old Marine corps veteran had begun tweeting about his 11 years in the Baltimore Police Department and all the things he had seen that he now felt needed to be shared. They drove a short distance to a side street where Jenkins told Kostoplis to leave his phone and equipment in the van and get out. I was sitting up at CBGBs [music club], the only Black girl with shaved hair, screaming, and I had a zine. You were filming as this was all playing out in real time. With Bomenka around the corner, Suiter approached this figure, shots rang out, and Bomenka raced to the scene, whereas frantic bodycam footage illustrateshe found Suiter lying dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Podcast episodes are available each week right after the latest episode. Dominic West went on to play Prince Charles in The Crown; Wendell Pierce took on Willy Loman in a London stage production of Death of a Salesman; Idris Elba starred in Luther, Thor and Cats; Michael K Williams burned brightly in Boardwalk Empire and others before his jarring death in September. Nick. What really got me with the Baltimore Rising cast is I saw them speak at a museum and I was like, Oh my god! I cried. Her first feature documentary Baltimore Rising portrayed the city in the aftermath of Freddie Grays death and THE SLOW HUSTLE continues her work focusing on Baltimore and its inherent racial and socio-economic problems. The GTTF officers provide additional damning evidence. What it does offer, however, is a forlorn perspective on a major metropolis whose police force has so betrayed the publics trust that the truth is now impossible to determineand, consequently, cynicism reigns supreme regarding the powers-that-be. With no reliable eyewitnesses to the crime, a harried if largely clueless search ensued, most of it predicated on a generic description of a Black man in a dark jacket with a white stripe. The more I looked into it, the stranger it seemed. Fenton, who worked as a consultant on the six-episode TV drama, says: It really is just absolutely staggering. English, Pakistan SONJA SOHN: I think the one thing that I had to zero in on or hone in on was the fact that there - that this was a Black man who appeared to be murdered, whose murder was unsolved and quite possibly could have been at the hands of law enforcement. English, Israel Baltimore Police. The cast includes Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead,Show Me a Hero),Josh Charles (The Good Wife,In Treatment), Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country), and Jamie Hector (BOSCH,The Wire), among many others. It tells how a shift in policing strategy in 2007 led to the creation of the GTTF amid concern that police had spent too long pursuing drugs rather than guns. D. is what I would call a true son of Baltimore and a voice of Baltimore. Det James Kostoplis testified that, soon after joining the GTTF, he was asked by Jenkins to go for a ride. The Slow Hustle contains interviews with Suiters widow and children, lawyers, politicians and investigative journalists, and Baltimore police including former commissioner Kevin Davis. Like many series right now, this one is using a nonfiction story to approximate the power of fictional drama. We Own This City: Created by George Pelecanos, David Simon. That twist alone makes The Slow Hustle a fascinating whodunit, and complicating matters further, it eventually came out that Suiter may not have been as clean as people thought. But theres a lot of pushback of course. FLORIDO: Your film really does document the Baltimore Police Department's long history of corruption. The Wire's Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: 'We are seeing multilayered corruption' The series was shot in Baltimore and brings together several alumni of the The Wire, both on. However, in this particular instance, the dynamics at play arent quite as clear-cut as that description makes them sound. In the case of [the detective] Maurice Ward, he said it was an accident: he didnt turn in drugs and he realised that nobody asked him about it and then he sees other people around him skimming money and its like, Wow, we can do this and nothings going to happen. And it just escalates from there.. Suiter faces distrust of the police at a crime scene. And that's where D. Watkins comes in to play - someone who's lived on sort of both sides of the track and having, you know, been, you know, a critical, you know, just a social critic and delving into those topics and bringing that perspective. He was law enforcement. Rayam opens up about the GTTF. In a war, you count the bodies and then you call them victories., Its a strong editorial, but that does not make for a great show. THE SLOW HUSTLE follows Detective Suitors widow and local investigative reporters as they work to get answers in the Suiter case and hold the Baltimore Police Department and City Hall accountable. Read on for more. Spanish, Brazil They didnt trot these guys out for press conferences. In March 2017, eight members of the GTTF were indicted and arrested on federal charges of robbery, extortion, overtime fraud and selling drugs seized during police operations. Richard Gonzales. 2023 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Slow Hustle starts with shocking footage of Suiters body being discovered (Oh, my god!, Sean, no! It opens as Jenkins gives a speech to his unit in which he seems to say the right things that beating on people gets in the way of doing the job and that, in the task force, were not about that kind of brutality. Will members of the community reach out to us? At this point we are less than 10 min into the documentary. Watkins is the most outspoken of The Slow Hustles many talking heads, but even he confesses that anythings possible when it comes to Suiter, given that its difficult to ascertain the nature and degree of his involvement with the GTTF. Late in the series, she meets with Brian Grabler (Treat Williams), a retired detective turned critic of the department, who makes a Socratic case that the war on drugs has failed. Im not sure the police have proven that.. Their solution: They sold the drugs and firearm back onto the street. Along the way, though, you got a lot of rich personal stories to invest in, which is how dramas with a broad social scope manage to succeed as both art and argument. The official podcast of the HBO Original Limited Series. The phones are smarter; the law enforcement machinery is not. I consider Baltimore to be as much of a home to me as the place where I grew up in Virginia. The six-episode scripted series is at once an extension, an updating and a partial revision of their landmark dramas critique of policing. The Wire had built into it the distinction between good police work (painstaking, intensive, focused on real harm) and bad (petty busts and harassment to drive up arrest numbers and make politicians look good). Except, as The Slow Hustle soon reveals, things werent as cut and dried as they initially appeared. Anyone can read what you share. Copyright 2021 NPR. Looking for more? In HBOs We Own This City, Jon Bernthal plays Sgt. A far-reaching corruption scandal is the last thing Baltimore's troubled police department needs. Ive been waiting for you all my life and now youre here and Im an old lady. But lets see what I can do. It found an extended institutional failure of the police departments internal affairs along with broad supervisory breakdowns. She's also an actor. But its indictments lack the character shading that animated Simons adaptations of the housing-policy story Show Me a Hero and his own book The Corner.. Baltimore prosecutors want greater flexibility to undo convictions after Gun Trace Task Force scandal. English, Thailand The Baltimore dialogue still has Old Bay piquancy, and some strong performances kick scenes to life. Maurice Ward recounts how Jenkins remained unscathed despite several illegal incidents. Its arguments are bold and impossible to miss. Despite numerous complaints, Hersl is placed on the GTTF. Suiter, it turned out, wasnt just some nondescript detective; he was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury about his fellow officers corruption the following day. Thats a terrible fucking idea. But this type of casual everyday lying, stealing, misrepresenting information, in some cases framing people its hard to prove and for that reason it often went unaddressed., The misconduct continued despite the outcry over Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died of neck injuries suffered in police custody in April 2015. English, Belgium Jenkins followed in his fathers footsteps by joining the Marines but happened to leave with an honourable discharge just a month before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Its like someone describing how they first stole money. He also learns a sense of entitlement; the seriess title comes from a speech in which he tells his cronies that as long as we put those numbers up by making arrests, they can do what they want. "Adrienne". 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