re: We Own This City coming to HBO in April

They're trying to make us feel bad for Wayne Jenkins in this one. All i need to remember he robbed a midget stripper a few ep back.

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They're trying to make us feel bad for Wayne Jenkins in this one.

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Sorta, it’s more to hammer that Wayne is a product of a fricked up department and not that the department is a product of him.

He was awarded for his behavior

I wished they’d have shown real pictures of all of the police in gttf at the end. That was a bit underwhelming.

Would recommend The Slow Hustle on HBO Max, which is a documentary about Sean Suiter.

By the way, for both dirty cops and lower level drug dealers I can see how it can get complicated, how the ends justify the means. Some feel compelled to do the wrong things for the right reasons.

The real assholes are at the top of the food chain.

The real problem is the war on drugs. It has been a complete failure in preventing abuse of illegal drugs and has dramatically increased violent crimes. Trying to enforce terrible drug policies has created almost all of the police brutality situations, increased corruption, and amplified mistrust.

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Sorta, it’s more to hammer that Wayne is a product of a fricked up department and not that the department is a product of him.

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It was both. Wayne came in idealistic. (I thought they did a bad job with timelines. Too easy to get them confused. The only way you knew when it was was with the date they typed into the old computers and Bernthal’s facial hair and hair do). But right after current Wayne—or Wayne from 2 years ago, hard to tell—gives that amazing speech at the opening with the longer hair and stubble, it goes to a flashback of him from I guess 2003–so 14 years from the most current timeline—in what I assume was his 1st day on the street as a beat cop. He’s clean shaven and hair short. And he walks down the street twirling his baton and finds that older man walking out of a liquor store. And they just stare at each other. You can see it in Wayne’s eyes he’s not sure what to do. You can see his mind—his angel and devil—battling on what his move should be. We find out a bit later in a scene that should have come before this one as it took place before this, maybe even that morning. And he decides to take his baton and break that old man’s beer bottle as hard as he could. He was sending a message to that man, to the streets of Baltimore, to the audience, and to himself, that that’s who he was going to be. “Wayne Jenkins” was born right there when he decided he was going to be a wolf and not a sheep. You can either “own the city” or get owned by it. And Wayne Jenkins was not gonna get owned by the streets of the city of Baltimore.

But the other scene I mentioned was the morning of his 1st day. And he walked into the squad room and was looking around, taking it all in, and started looking at the plaques on the wall. He walked around slowly looking at them and walked right up to one. You could tell he was thinking about his name one day being on a plaque like that hanging on the wall, celebrating him for all his years of good service. Wayne Jenkins was idealistic. But not for long.

His trainer came up to him, poured a cup of coffee—Wayne declined—and told him to “forget all that shite they taught you at the academy.” Cut to 2 years later, and Wayne is now the trainer, HE is drinking the coffee, he tells the new guy (Yang?) to sit in the very chair he had sat in just 2 years ago, and basically gives him the “forget all that shite you learned” line almost verbatim. Completely different dude just 2 years later, but he realized real quick you have to be a wolf to survive. And Wayne Jenkins decided to be a wolf when he smashed that man’s beer bottle a couple scenes before.

So yeah, Wayne was definitely a product of the system, but he perpetuated the cycle by teaching it to the next guy. But it wasn’t about corruption as much as sheer survival. The corruption was a by-product of the mayor or somebody wanting to run for Governor and maybe the Obama administration if they were getting federal funding just throwing a shite/ton of money at the problem (“the faucet is wide open” or something was a line they used) and they didn’t care about solving the problem as much as they cared about the perception that they were solving the problem. Stats were all that mattered. How many arrests did they make? How many guns did they “take off the street?” (Guns they often planted). They made tons of bad arrests just to tally up their scores. And were rewarded for it with unlimited overtime (that they didn’t even work) being approved, promotions, and realizing they could double dip by appearing as witnesses in court.

And I imagine it sucks to be a cop in any urban American city, but Baltimore, especially after Freddie Gray and that aftermath (forget what you think about that incident, it certainly caused almost unprecedented tension). Cops had to deal with not knowing whether they would make it home at night. And for the shite pay (that they should have got), it was easy to justify all the skimming off the top they were doing. Power corrupts, and the Baltimore PD was given a lot of power. Almost everybody would taken a little here or there. Hell, the one guy who said he tossed his share because it was too much said he had to take it or the guys in his unit would think he either already was or was destined to be a snitch.

So yeah, I don’t think it was an indictment on the cops of Baltimore at the time, or even the criminals. shite was always gonna go this way. That’s how the system was set up.

One of my favorite scenes was when Wayne got arrested and the fat new Police Commissioner walked into the interrogation room to see Wayne and they had an epic staring contest. Wayne didn’t fricking blink. Commoner walks out and says, “Everyone else eventually turned their heads, this motherfricker didn’t even blink.” Was that because Wayne was just a super confident badass by this time? Sure. But I think it was more about him having actually convinced himself he hadn’t done anything wrong. And with the way the system was set up to reward guys like him, he had a good point. (That scene earlier when he brought the little crabs to party and caught shite for how small they were, but that was all he could afford, was really effective at helping understand his character.)

But the final scene where he’s starting to break down in his cell, having flashbacks to earlier in his career, then walks out into the yard and starts looking around, you can see that he’s almost incredulous about how he got there. Starting to doubt, if not flat out regret, some of things he did that lead him there. Maybe there wasn’t really moral justification for some of the shite he did. Maybe he wasn’t just a victim. Maybe he was never the hero. Maybe he didn’t have to be such a wolf to survive. “How the frick did I wind up here? How is this now my life? What if I just hadn’t broken that fricking old man’s beer bottle?”