The conflicting theories on his death speak to stark divisions between the involved parties an independent review board ruled his death a suicide, a theory that the Suiter family strongly resists. So you have to think thats making a difference. Michael Bromwich, a former US justice department inspector general, and his team conducted a two-year investigation that included more than 160 interviews and examined hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. For me this case, and the familys position in this case, represent the microcosm of the macrocosm, she says. Instead, its members were convicted on corruption charges. David Simon returns to a familiar beat for HBO, updating if not improving on an old critique. The mission of the Black Mental Health Alliance (BMHA) is to develop, promote, and sponsor trusted culturally-relevant educational forums, training, and referral services that support the health and well-being of Black people and vulnerable communities. We Own This City seems to question not whether good policing exists but whether the current system makes it impossible. That produces a culture taken to its extreme, which it was in Baltimore by many, that the ends justify the means, Bromwich continues. Naturally, Suiters wife Nicole didnt take kindly to the notion that her husband had offed himself in a supposed plan to avoid testifying, and the medical examiner failed to shed conclusive light on the situation. info_outline, Includes: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo - Brazzaville, Congo - Kinshasa, Cte dIvoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guadeloupe, Guinea, Guyana, Madagascar, Mali, Martinique, Mauritius, Monaco, Niger, Runion, Senegal, Togo, Germany, Austria, Switzerland A protest of Sean Suiters death in The Slow Hustle. How, why and by whom has never been solved. Rather than just railing against the GTTF, Watkins spends time discussing the numerous similarities he shares with one of the convicted officers in order to highlight how Baltimores problems are less about individuals than about the environment in which theyre raised and operate. 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. The Feds prepare charges. We Own This City tends to choose telling over showing, however, especially on the investigation side of the story. A unit of the Baltimore Police Department, the Gun Trace Task Force, was supposed to target guns and drugs on the city's streets. 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. FLORIDO: Your film really does document the Baltimore Police Department's long history of corruption. We Own This City is still a very good show, with granular realism, a sly sense of humor and fine acting top to bottom. It is not a good look.. A detective in a nearby county traces a string of overdoses to Baltimore. That should be happening anyway. I felt alone and I was happy. English, English Speaking Africa Includes: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo - Brazzaville, Congo - Kinshasa, Cte d'Ivoire, Djibouti . There was no specific training for supervisors. Bernthal (recently of the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark) makes a convincing baby gangster, arrogant and petulant, growing sloppier and greedier. English, Portugal Michael A. Whatever happened to the cast? Sean!) in an alley in West Baltimore, an area notorious for poverty, segregation and violent crime. FLORIDO: D. Watkins - that's one of the journalists who covers this case as it's playing out and who you feature in the film. And I think that's quite a journey that we're all on here, you know, in this country. Jenkins learns his fellow officers are cooperating with the investigation as the full extent of his crimes come to light. They didnt trot these guys out for press conferences. 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. He became a police cadet in 2003, married and bought a house. Suiter is assigned to a new murder case. Suiter faces distrust of the police at a crime scene. But except for flashbacks, the story is set in the latter 2010s. With a mission to improve Baltimore through green space and education, Parks & Peoplebelieves that everyone deserves a park as a place to learn, play, grow and enjoy. Sgt Wayne Jenkins was the ringleader and is the central protagonist of the book and TV series. I need a unit medic right now. I want to just give the team credit; theyve been making documentaries for 30 years. English, Denmark It wasnt a very large initiative, just a handful of officers, a single unit, and they went about their work with little fanfare. The streets, the drug houses, the cops pursuing petty busts to drive up their stats you can almost hear the voice telling you to keep the devil way down in the hole. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. I was railing when there was nobody railing with me. Ultimately, the journey reveals how theculture of corruption within the ranks of the Baltimore police forcecontributed to the destruction of the publics trust and impacted the police departments ability to solve a shooting deathof one of its own. Let us stipulate that it is unfair to compare any series to The Wire, even if it is about policing, even if it is set in Baltimore, even if it happens to be made by two of the figures behind that HBO all-time great, which marks its two-decade anniversary this year. It spans dozens if not hundreds of incidents under our noses and theres reasons for that which I try to explain in the book. And with little apparent will to transform police departments (and their cultures of silence and coercion) or the political institutions that support them, it comes across as a deeply rooted malady for which theres no easy cure. His elite unit came to be seen by senior commanders as a bulwark against chaos. Why isnt his death solved by now? Directed by Tiller Russell, The Seven Five examines police corruption in the 75th precinct of the NYPD. Oh, Lord. The city had also recorded 714 robberies, an increase of almost 25%. Im sure those who are involved in policy making are in the midst of looking at how to develop a more nuanced strategy on some other levels because the folks who are in opposition are playing serious chess right now. That is the rumour that sweeps like a wildfire through the city and the fact thats the first theory that erupts says something on a larger scale about what could happen if the police dont get their act together and regain the trust of the people., Sohn adds: To me, what Nicole [Suiters widow] and the family are going through is the microcosmic example of what is happening to all of us, that when public institutions and structures dont get their act together, the people suffer and, in this instance, the family suffers.. How is this going to be investigated? In July of 2022, the lead investigator into Sean Suiter's death, Sgt James Lloyd was sentenced to one year in jail for using his fellow policemen to harass a contractor working on his home. I said, Where were you? Washingtonian spoke with Sohn last week about her new joint. English, Belgium So rumors and speculation ran rampant about what really happened to Officer Suiter, not just among residents, but also among politicians, among journalists. The actor-turned-directors new film The Slow Hustle tells the story of a detective who was killed just before he was set to testify in a corruption case. Their solution: They sold the drugs and firearm back onto the street. The police department is now under federal oversight but the decades-old spectre of corruption lingers. English, Argentina Five years after the Gun Trace Task Force corruption scandal broke, a new report is giving the first comprehensive account of how the Baltimore Police Department repeatedly failed to address . The revelation that Suiter was granted limited immunity for testifying didnt clear anything up either; the fact remains that its conceivable he was executed for planning to rat out his friends, shot in a random skirmish gone wrong, or killed by his own hand in order to avoid facing future legal prosecution. Do we extend that to law enforcement as well? He enjoyed the admiration and respect of his superiors and was given special privileges. Sohn cofounded ReWired for Change, a local outreach programme for at-risk youth, and made her directorial debut in 2017 with Baltimore Rising, which depicted the Black-majority city in the aftermath of the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody. 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. Jenkins brings Suiter along on a raid. And in a war, you need warriors. Fenton, who worked as a consultant on the six-episode TV drama, says: It really is just absolutely staggering. Officers tell me that its a new day over there and everybodys wearing body cameras all the time, which wasnt the case until pretty late in the investigation of the gun trace taskforce. Jenkins Waynes. To return to our unfair comparison, The Wire believed that systemic forces mattered more than individual failure or triumph. Like many series right now, this one is using a nonfiction story to approximate the power of fictional drama. It found an extended institutional failure of the police departments internal affairs along with broad supervisory breakdowns. She is the director of the new HBO documentary called "The Slow Hustle." I think the other thing that really got me was understanding that with this crime not being solved, with this death not being solved, if the police are involved in that, then theyre willing to throw this family under the bus. English, Korea 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. English, Pakistan The Slow Hustle starts with shocking footage of Suiters body being discovered (Oh, my god!, Sean, no! But the GTTFs reign of impunity was cut short when a suburban drug investigation happened to reveal one officers contacts with a drug organisation. Through media arts education, Wide Angle Youth Media cultivates and amplifies the voices of Baltimore youth to engage audiences across generational, cultural, and social divides. All rights reserved. We Own This City is based on a book by the Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. English, New Zealand Coming to the city was was kind of a reckoning with my own self. Here, WWD looks at 11 new documentaries and docuseries to watch in December 2021. On Wednesday morning, former Baltimore police Sgt. Was his death a calculated effort to keep him silent, or was Suiter himself a cop under scrutiny with a past he couldnt face? FLORIDO: The officer shot that day in 2017 was Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter. English, United Kingdom It is revealed that Suiter had been summoned to testify in the now infamous Gun Trace Task Force trial, an elite police unit that proved to be one of the dirtiest in Baltimores recent history. The Baltimore police department, recognising that the problem was perhaps guns more than drugs, wanted to have a smarter approach. The HBO drama is based on Justin Fentons nonfiction book of the same name. I did not want to initially direct another film that involves law enforcement. Focusing on the 1980s, the documentary tells the story of Michael Dowd, a former. I think Baltimore does what it did to me and its a divine mirror. Kostoplis was transferred out of the GTTF soon after. Eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) were being investigated for a wide range of offenses, including shaking down citizens, filing false paperwork, committing civil rights violations, and making fraudulent overtime claimsas well as rolling around town in unmarked cars while wearing black hockey masks, robbing drug dealers of their narcotics and cash, and then planting evidence on them to send them up the river. Nobody knew. By what name was The Slow Hustle (2021) officially released in Canada in English? While the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, after a rough ride in a police van, is not depicted, it hangs over everything here, from Black Baltimoreans mistrust of the police to the post-Gray work slowdown by officers. 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). We Own This City Review: Baltimore Police Problems, Rewired, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/arts/television/we-own-this-city-review.html. Bringing Jenkins and his ilk to justice does not mean Baltimores problems are resolved. But after meeting [Suiters wife] Nicole, and beginning to see that there were pieces missing in the investigation of Seans Suiters death, likethis is a cop. English, France e was praised as a positive role model. Or was he an accomplice, on the take just like his boys-in-blue brethren? Baltimore is rocked by the Freddie Gray protests. Now she returns there with The Slow Hustle, an HBO documentary that examines the 2017 death of Sean Suiter, a widely respected Black police detective fatally shot in the head while on duty. English, Hong Kong He and members of the GTTF framed the two men that Jenkins had been pursuing by planting drug evidence. The Wires Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: We are seeing multilayered corruption, Director Sonja Sohn interviewing D Watkins for The Slow Hustle. The leader of a rogue Baltimore police unit sobbed as he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a corruption scandal prosecutors called "breathtaking". And Josh Charles (The Good Wife) plays impressively against type as Daniel Hersl, a bullet-headed task-force thug who makes Jenkins look like a diplomat. Its arguments are bold and impossible to miss. In April 2010, for example, Jenkins was involved in a reckless car chase that led to the death of an innocent motorist. But unlike that venerated saga, We Own This City is based on the true story told in the journalist Justin Fentons nonfiction book of the same name. The convicted officers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from seven to 25 years. 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. Former members of the Baltimore Police Department, from internal affairs to the former commissioner, attempt to shed light on that fateful afternoon and the atmosphere within the department. / You know, it took a minute to gain their trust. On Nov. 15, 2017, Suiter was accompanying his rookie partner David Bomenka on an assignment when he allegedly spotted a suspicious figure in an alleyway in the citys Harlem Park neighborhood. The creators, cast, and crew discuss the rigorous research and attention to detail that went into bringing this true story to life in Baltimore. And I think that its a very valid perspective, which is why I made sure it was included in the film. The Slow Hustle contains interviews with Suiters widow and children, lawyers, politicians and investigative journalists, and Baltimore police including former commissioner Kevin Davis. Ive been waiting for you all my life and now youre here and Im an old lady. But lets see what I can do. Whats Their Deal? 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. 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 George's 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. Ex-po. Anyone can read what you share. EN. The city knows that Suiter was going to testify against a group of corrupt cops and there is this history of corruption in the police department in Baltimore, then that lack of trust is amplified throughout this city., So the first theory that folks are thinking is, Of course you guys killed him. Jenkins learns stark truths about policing as a new officer. But it is a pointed reminder that after all this time to quote a series that remains quotable for a reason the game is the game. That is D.s perspective within the film. Reinaldo Marcus Green directs and serves as executive producer. English, Malaysia I think of Baltimore as my soul home, Sohn, 57, says by phone from North Carolinas Outer Banks. Looking for more? He was praised as a positive role model. We Own This City: Created by George Pelecanos, David Simon. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, my god. For HBO: senior producer, Sara Rodriguez; executive producers, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller. The corruption has cost Baltimore taxpayers more than $13 million in settlements with victims and hundreds of cases the corrupt officers worked on had to be thrown out. Will it be reported? 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. Led by interviews with Salons D. Watkins (a Baltimore native), The Baltimore Suns Justin Fenton and WMAR-TVs Brian Kuebler, Sohns film immerses itself in a city plagued by pervasive distrust of the police, thanks to a long history of corruption, harassment and murderthe most recent and notorious example of which was the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray. See production, box office & company info, Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall, Bad tidings in the Baltimore Police Department. The GTTF further damaged the already troubled relationship between police and residents of Baltimore. There are poignant moments at the fallen officers graveside and at an anniversary vigil. Thats a terrible fucking idea. You may know her for her role as a Baltimore police detective in the hit series "The Wire." HBO documentary about Baltimore Police and Detective Sean Suiter's death set to debut in December By Alex Mann Baltimore Sun Nov 12, 2021 at 11:03 am A documentary film profiling. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. It hasnt escaped David Simon and George Pelecanos, the creator and a producer of The Wire, who have returned to their geographic and rhetorical turf with We Own This City, beginning on HBO Monday. Was Suiter an unwitting participant in a scheme carried out by rogue cops? April 24, 2022 Let us stipulate that it is unfair to compare any series to "The Wire," even if it is about policing, even if it is set in Baltimore, even if it happens to be made by two of the. What do you think, Sonia, the mystery of Sean Suiter's death and the fallout say about Baltimore and the public's relationship with the police as a whole? 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. Right now were dealing on a mass level with this lack of trust of law enforcement because of the way they have treated Black folks. Through his early years on the force, Jenkins goes from learning how to scam the overtime rules to outright larceny. The Bachelor Has Two Maryland Contestants. The phones are smarter; the law enforcement machinery is not. None, it seems, let Baltimore get under their skin as much as Sonja Sohn, who played police detective Kima Greggs the first major portrayal of a Black lesbian on American television on the trail of drug lords in the five-season drama. For every inept, violent Roland Pryzbylewski, there was a Lester Freamon, practicing the patient craft of building a case. Then I thought, okay, heres the possibility of actually solving the case. You were filming as this was all playing out in real time. Det James Kostoplis testified that, soon after joining the GTTF, he was asked by Jenkins to go for a ride. opens, it's "November 15, 2017" and we hear a frantic 911 call about a Baltimore police officer having been shot, and we then get the body cam footage as cops arrive on the scene. HBO doc "The Slow Hustle" examines the mysterious death of Baltimore cop Sean Suiter, who was set to testify against police corruption and then was found with a bullet in the head. Jenkins learns stark truths about policing as a bulwark against chaos 2021 ) officially released in in! A book by the Baltimore police detective in a reckless car chase that led to the death of innocent! 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