We Own This City review: HBO’s cop drama can’t solve policing

“Most police worth their shit, they can write their way out of anything,” Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) smirks to a room of cadets in creators David Simon and George Pelecanos’ HBO crime series This City We Own

It’s nearly played as a throwaway line by Bernthal, a dash that compounds a montage taking viewers through the systematic inequality and state-sponsored terrorism in Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore city police harassing young Black men, the extralegal courts sentencing African Americans to harsh sentences, and the dehumanized Black men standing, petrified, in prison. Reinaldo Marc Green directed the limited six-episode series (King Richard), Bernthal’s line explains the root of the problem and establishes the actor as the lone pulse in a dull and deliberate series that puts the system on trial but has little time for the people.

This City Is Ours is a ruminative show with a multitude of moving parts — too many, in fact. Justin Fenton’s nonfiction novel of the same name, adapted by Simon and Pelecanos (The WireThe story is set in a place still recovering from the death of Freddie Gray, and subsequent uprising that he sparked. See, ever since Gray’s death, crime is high and the arrests are low because cops are unwilling to leave their cars for fear their “good” policing will be mistaken for bad (what constitutes “good” policing is never wholly explained in the series). It’s left everyone on edge, still searching for answers.

The nonlinear narrative — spanning 2003 to 2017 and told mostly through Jenkins’ eyes, the nearest the series has to a main character — tracks four seemingly separate investigations. In 2015 Detectives McDougall and Kilpatrick, who are looking for a drug dealer, begin the first episode. A mysterious tracker attached to the dealer’s car and a few careless whispers caught on wiretaps lead the investigators to the feet of Jenkins and his Gun Force Task Squad — a force assigned to stop drugs and guns from proliferating on the streets only to resort to crime, theft, abuse, and drug dealing themselves.

Photo: Paul Schiraldi/HBO

At times, in its piecing together of the Rubik’s Cube of clues, This City Is Ours maneuvers like True DetectiveThe second season is much more complex than the first. The second investigation involves FBI agents interrogating smart-mouth former cops Momodu “G Money” Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Maurice Ward (Rob Brown) in prison. Each person contributes a piece to the Jenkins puzzle. No actor is allowed to be the best in an ensemble show that’s devoted to proving the system. Instead, they’re cogs. And maybe that’s the point; these disgraced officers are just a few of the many bad apples. That, however, doesn’t make for captivating television — it only distances us from the complex mystery at the heart of the series.

A similar fate befalls Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country() As the unspecific Nicole Steele. She is a non-specific lawyer for the Office of Civil Rights who examines complaints about brutal police tactics against Black people. Steele, one of only a few women characters in a story about men and rampant BPD machismo is one. However, Mosaku’s ability to create a fulfilling interior life is limited by an inexplicable script. Even though the lawyer speaks with people of all races, these conversations don’t address the system’s inequalities, but instead empathize with those most affected. The only exception to this is the traffic stop, where a Black child sees his father humiliated by a police officer, thus starting the vicious cycle of fear.

One of the few characters with any personal life beyond the force is newly minted Detective Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector) who’s investigating a murder of a young Black man in an alley. Suiter is passionate about his work. We only barely see Suiter’s wife and children. They appear in glances (there’s also an HBO Max documentary, Slow HustleAbout his life and career. Every level This City Is Ours has zero interest in building out women, or quite frankly, anything that’s not a case.

Photo: Paul Schiraldi/HBO

Brimming with swagger for days, Bernthal is the script’s only non-casualty — probably because he’s such a great actor, and rarely has he been offered the screen time to really chew scenery as much as he has here. Bernthal imbues each scene with an energy that is wild and energetic, similar to a crab wading through sand. He is a character in his own right with his mustache and goatee. Through this physically adept performance, we see how Jenkins enters the force in 2003 — tight back, straight and narrow gaze — slowly dissolve into the hunched, kingpin walk he assumes as he resorts to dirtier tactics in the years to come. Bernthal is the embodiment of the cyclical training that makes already inept cops worse. On his first day, his veteran partner, ambivalent to the shock in Jenkins’ eyes, tells him to forget what he learned in the academy: You take. You get paid. In the end, you cause death.Another scene depicts the competition between officers for rich Black people. Jenkins arrives with a basket of crabs to cookout. However, he is outdone by his wealthy comrades. This moment inspires Jenkins to strive for more and push the limits.

If This City Is Ours gets one thing right, it’s understanding the system. Not just the big bails, the stalking by police, or how BPD used seatbelt laws to illegally search cars to steal money — but the institution of arrests at all cost, and how an officer’s word means everything and nothing. Daniel Hersl, a completely underutilized Josh Charles, has 50 complaints against his record but he continues to serve because he is arrested. Acting police chief, however, wants reform but not to make hard decisions. The narrative displays the vices — greed, sex, and drugs — that marked all levels of BPD, especially the Gun Force Task Squad.

All of this unravels when Bernthal moves offscreen. There is a confusing timeline that can be difficult to understand and characters not memorable. In six episodes, the series drags. It could easily have been halved. Its pressing social issues are accompanied by a weighty mystery. This City Is OursEveryone desperately longs to be The Wire True DetectiveHowever, the script lacks the narrative flair to rival the amazing twists of the headlines that the story is taken from.

This City Is OursOn April 25, HBO will premiere the first episode. Each Monday is a new episode.