We Own this City - Episodes 3 & 4
First of all, Wunmi Mosaku is my new girl crush. I feel like this show should be using more of her because every time she is onscreen she just owns the scene. It makes me miss Ruby and Letitia a lot. It's nice seeing her take on more roles. She is a presence!
I just finished the third and fourth episode of the show and I want to get used to getting my thoughts out of the way before hitting the sack. I want to get myself back into obsessively writing everything down again, especially when I arrive at realizations I want to process. I want to see how far I can train myself to think sharp and write fast before I get distracted from doing it at all.
So, here are my thoughts on the latest episodes of We Own This City.
Episode 3: Part Three
...we meet the other police officers implicated in the FBI takedown of the Gun Trace Task Force. We meet Thomas Allers and Maurice Ward (the latter is played by Rob Brown (Coach Carter, Finding Forrester) and it pleases my inner 14 year old to see him on my screen again) who give their testimonies to the FBI on just how deep the rabbit hole of police corruption goes.
Then, there's a juxtaposition of the stories of Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector), a Homicide Detective, and Nicole Steele (Mosaku), a Civil Rights Lawyer for the DOJ, who are both trying to do their jobs and build their cases. We see how difficult that is to do in a city with growing near-irreconcilable distrust between the police and its communities. Sean, for example, struggles to piece together a murder case when nobody in the neighborhood trusts cops enough to talk to them.
For her part, Nicole struggles to get the Police Union to provide her with a clear answer on whether or not police are deliberately leaving the city out to dry following the string of indictments against the police in the murder of Freddie Gray. It becomes clear that Gray's death has changed the landscape of policing.
But as we go deeper into the episode, we learn that the root of the distrust that makes both Sean and Nicole's jobs so much harder to do goes back farther than Freddie Gray. Distrust was planted and reinforced systematically over time by the kind of leadership and politics that is driven by a numbers game. Everyone is driven by the goal to control the numbers to their favor: compensate for low salaries, generate funding, gather votes, raise 'overtime' pay, lower or raise arrest numbers, hand out settlements, and so on.
There is no chance that disciplinary action or reform is going to ever come from within. As the police commissioner himself explains, he's just inheriting somebody else's mess and he's not getting any support - from the mayor or from his men - to deal with it accordingly.
So, this is what I really liked about watching the Wire. I really love the fact that it drives home how difficult it is to create genuine change and reform in bureaucratic systems that favor apathy and greed. How do you create change when you're up against that? When it's clear that their priority is not about doing their jobs but keeping them?
The kind of stuff that I missed in the first two episodes of this show is finally here.
Episode 4: Part Four
...the show continues from the perspective of the FBI agents building their case. Ward goes even deeper into the kind of man Jenkins is. Ward talks about what it's like working with him, and narrates the many times that they've harassed and robbed citizens together under the guise of doing their job. It's organized robbery in broad daylight.
Meanwhile, Suiter's murder case struggles to fill a jury. Turns out there are now more people in Baltimore who hate cops than there are who willing to help them find justice. Again, the fallout over Freddie Gray hangs like a shadow over the city.
In the previous episode, during Suiter's plainclothes days, Jenkins offers Suiter money that Suiter watched him take from a crime site. Jenkins rationalizes taking it, and although we don't see Suiter keep it the point of the scene was to highlight how weakly Jenkins' philosophy lands with Suiter.
In this episode, Jenkins pulls the same oratory exercise with his team at the bar. He does so again in the shadow of the city's anger over Gray and insists that cops are the victims, with their low pay and the high costs of doing their job. It lands better.
"It sounds like you're running for something chief," says one of Jenkins lackeys, and in a way he is.
We get a glimpse of how people are radicalized on either side of a system that is designed to hurt the people it should be serving.
After the two episodes, it's clear why they chose this format. As with the Wire, We Own This City explores institutions and how they are absolutely not neutral in polarized climates. It wasn't obvious in the first two episodes but as we begin to know more about the FBI case against the Gun Trace Task Force, the show's format of jumping timelines is much more conducive to the mechanics of building a case. It's not a linear exercise. There's a lot of back and forth, a lot of corroboration of statements. Things get revealed in time.
All in all, I am super enjoying this show.
I just finished the third and fourth episode of the show and I want to get used to getting my thoughts out of the way before hitting the sack. I want to get myself back into obsessively writing everything down again, especially when I arrive at realizations I want to process. I want to see how far I can train myself to think sharp and write fast before I get distracted from doing it at all.
So, here are my thoughts on the latest episodes of We Own This City.
Episode 3: Part Three
...we meet the other police officers implicated in the FBI takedown of the Gun Trace Task Force. We meet Thomas Allers and Maurice Ward (the latter is played by Rob Brown (Coach Carter, Finding Forrester) and it pleases my inner 14 year old to see him on my screen again) who give their testimonies to the FBI on just how deep the rabbit hole of police corruption goes.
Then, there's a juxtaposition of the stories of Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector), a Homicide Detective, and Nicole Steele (Mosaku), a Civil Rights Lawyer for the DOJ, who are both trying to do their jobs and build their cases. We see how difficult that is to do in a city with growing near-irreconcilable distrust between the police and its communities. Sean, for example, struggles to piece together a murder case when nobody in the neighborhood trusts cops enough to talk to them.
For her part, Nicole struggles to get the Police Union to provide her with a clear answer on whether or not police are deliberately leaving the city out to dry following the string of indictments against the police in the murder of Freddie Gray. It becomes clear that Gray's death has changed the landscape of policing.
But as we go deeper into the episode, we learn that the root of the distrust that makes both Sean and Nicole's jobs so much harder to do goes back farther than Freddie Gray. Distrust was planted and reinforced systematically over time by the kind of leadership and politics that is driven by a numbers game. Everyone is driven by the goal to control the numbers to their favor: compensate for low salaries, generate funding, gather votes, raise 'overtime' pay, lower or raise arrest numbers, hand out settlements, and so on.
There is no chance that disciplinary action or reform is going to ever come from within. As the police commissioner himself explains, he's just inheriting somebody else's mess and he's not getting any support - from the mayor or from his men - to deal with it accordingly.
So, this is what I really liked about watching the Wire. I really love the fact that it drives home how difficult it is to create genuine change and reform in bureaucratic systems that favor apathy and greed. How do you create change when you're up against that? When it's clear that their priority is not about doing their jobs but keeping them?
The kind of stuff that I missed in the first two episodes of this show is finally here.
Episode 4: Part Four
...the show continues from the perspective of the FBI agents building their case. Ward goes even deeper into the kind of man Jenkins is. Ward talks about what it's like working with him, and narrates the many times that they've harassed and robbed citizens together under the guise of doing their job. It's organized robbery in broad daylight.
Meanwhile, Suiter's murder case struggles to fill a jury. Turns out there are now more people in Baltimore who hate cops than there are who willing to help them find justice. Again, the fallout over Freddie Gray hangs like a shadow over the city.
In the previous episode, during Suiter's plainclothes days, Jenkins offers Suiter money that Suiter watched him take from a crime site. Jenkins rationalizes taking it, and although we don't see Suiter keep it the point of the scene was to highlight how weakly Jenkins' philosophy lands with Suiter.
In this episode, Jenkins pulls the same oratory exercise with his team at the bar. He does so again in the shadow of the city's anger over Gray and insists that cops are the victims, with their low pay and the high costs of doing their job. It lands better.
"It sounds like you're running for something chief," says one of Jenkins lackeys, and in a way he is.
We get a glimpse of how people are radicalized on either side of a system that is designed to hurt the people it should be serving.
After the two episodes, it's clear why they chose this format. As with the Wire, We Own This City explores institutions and how they are absolutely not neutral in polarized climates. It wasn't obvious in the first two episodes but as we begin to know more about the FBI case against the Gun Trace Task Force, the show's format of jumping timelines is much more conducive to the mechanics of building a case. It's not a linear exercise. There's a lot of back and forth, a lot of corroboration of statements. Things get revealed in time.
All in all, I am super enjoying this show.