baltimore police corruption documentary
Or was he an accomplice, on the take just like his boys-in-blue brethren? Ex-po. 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). Theres been so much rightful attention on police brutality and so we know when an officer shoots somebody theres an injury, theres a death. Jenkins learns stark truths about policing as a new officer. English, New Zealand Visitors come to BARCS every day for reasons as diverse as reuniting with lost pets, adopting new furry family members, joining our foster and volunteer programs, and receiving free and low-cost resources to help them keep their pets at home. When we spoke recently, I asked what drew her to Detective Suiter's case. Six of the eight arrested pleaded guilty to the charges. As he notes, despite numerous different mayors and police commissioners, nothing much has changed in Baltimore over the years aside from the names of those engaging in criminal activity. In a war, you have enemies. I feel like the city is a reflection of my own psyche. The corruption and civic woes the show details, as in much of Simons work (Treme, The Deuce), are systemic. 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. See the full cast here. All rights reserved. By Samuel Sasu April 26, 2022. 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. Like many series right now, this one is using a nonfiction story to approximate the power of fictional drama. THE SLOW HUSTLE, a feature documentary directed by Sonja Sohn (HBOs Baltimore Rising, The Wire), chronicles the still unsolved death of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter, fatally shot in the head in 2017 while in the line of duty, and explores the ongoing speculation about what really happened that day. The program serves men in re-entry, addiction recovery, and veterans returning to the workforce. D Watkins, a local journalist and author who shares the view that Suiters death could have been an inside job, says in the film: What developed for me out of the whole story is this whole idea of Black lives really dont matter. Theyre a very private family. That is D.s perspective within the film. The unsolved case also sparked far-reaching implications for a city already grappling with the complexities of policing in contemporary, urban America. I need a unit medic right now. Wayne Jenkins, who as the real-life head of an elite Baltimore plainclothes unit turned it into a state-run gang. Im still worth something., The Slow Hustle is now available on HBO with a UK date to be announced. The official podcast of the HBO Original Limited Series. I did not want to initially direct another film that involves law enforcement. 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. She is the director of the new HBO documentary called "The Slow Hustle." The Baltimore dialogue still has Old Bay piquancy, and some strong performances kick scenes to life. It has nothing to do with my level of desire. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Reinaldo Marcus Green directs and serves as executive producer. He was praised as a positive role model. You were filming as this was all playing out in real time. Will members of the community reach out to us? English, The Netherlands 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. But these challenges continue and I wonder how we will know if the department has fixed itself. 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. You know, you cant have a badge on your chest and do things like that.. The editor, Donna Marino, she had something to do with that. THE SLOW HUSTLE includes insightful commentary from journalists who remain determined to speak truth to power, including Justin Fenton, author of We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption and D. Watkins, author of We Speak for Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress who believes the shooting death of Suiter could have been an inside job. It wasnt a very large initiative, just a handful of officers, a single unit, and they went about their work with little fanfare. Interview The Wire's Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: 'We are seeing multilayered corruption' David Smith in Washington The actor-turned-director's new film The Slow Hustle tells the. The Slow Hustle exists at the intersection of true crime and social justice documentaries, concerned as it is with a fatal mystery wrapped up in an epidemic of police corruption. I think you identified it perfectly. Maybe this is intentional. Sonja, thank you for joining us. Many residents in the city, especially in Black communities, just don't trust the police. The city had also recorded 714 robberies, an increase of almost 25%. And so it's clear to me this is another way to look at the question of how we're going to restructure a - how we're going to create another structure for protection and safety because right now, I'm not convinced that "defunding the police," quote, unquote, is really the thing because that's supporting social structures that support the people. WATCH NOW The Slow Hustle, an HBO original documentary from director Sonja Sohn (HBO's " Baltimore Rising " and " The Wire "), chronicles the still unsolved death of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter, fatally shot in 2017 while in the line of duty, and explores the ongoing speculation about what really happened that day. Greenwich Entertainment has just. What you might miss is the vivid human tapestry that brings this kind of institutional analysis to life on the screen and keeps it alive in your memory. We Own This City does not do much to explain Jenkins or complicate his villainy, but it is insightful about how a bad cop learns to be bad more effectively (and how he makes his colleagues worse). He became a police cadet in 2003, married and bought a house. At the center of The Slow Hustle is Baltimore Police Department detective Sean Suiter. What I knew from the get-go was that the crime scene was going to be critical, so there was going to have to be a graphics person on board to help us illuminate some of those details. 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. The latter, in the seriess view, allowed crime to spike and in turn motivated the police brass to ignore Jenkinss crimes until a federal investigation exposed them. There are other theories. Baltimore prosecutors want greater flexibility to undo convictions after Gun Trace Task Force scandal. I think investigators fell ass-backwards into this case. She's also an actor. English, United States They didnt trot these guys out for press conferences. In 2017, Baltimore was rocked by the federal indictment of Wayne Jenkins, a highly decorated super-cop and leader of. Podcast episodes are available each week right after the latest episode. Accuracy and availability may vary. That should be happening anyway. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. How do we measure that, how do we quantify that, especially given the deep-seated bad feelings about this department?. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. But at the same time, this was a police officer. A far-reaching corruption scandal is the last thing Baltimore's troubled police department needs. At this point, its a more nuanced game. He lives in Del Ray. Bernthal (recently of the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark) makes a convincing baby gangster, arrogant and petulant, growing sloppier and greedier. After Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter is killed in the line of duty, the tragedy soon becomes enmeshed in a widening corruption scandal that threatens to unravel the public's already After Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter is killed in the line of duty, the tragedy soon becomes enmeshed in a widening corruption scandal that threatens to unravel the public's already strained relationship with law enforcement. In practice, theyre all about that brutality and then some. Momodu Gondo finds himself in an interrogation. 5 Takeaways From ESPNs (Newest) Bombshell Dan Snyder Report, The Bidens Went to Dinner and Ordered the Same Dish, Dividing the Internet, PHOTOS: 2023 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize Honoree Dinner Celebrating Joni Mitchell, Cherry Blossom Peak Bloom Is Predicted for March 22-25. As new evidence emerges, the mystery deepens. 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 rumors and speculation ran rampant about what really happened to Officer Suiter, not just among residents, but also among politicians, among journalists. 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. His death set off a massive manhunt for the killer, and Suiter gets a hero's funeral. So to me, that was a microcosm of the macrocosm. Local hero and cage-fighting super-cop Wayne Jenkins was federally indicted on racketeering charges, along with six other members of Baltimore's elite Gun Trace Task Force. 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. While an Independent Review Board was ultimately created to get to the bottom of this, its conclusionthat Suiter had taken his own lifedidnt convince skeptics, especially considering that its final report featured at least one glaring factual error that undercut its reliability. Richard Gonzales. Once they realized that the rules that supposedly exist didnt really exist, its a slippery slope into saying, Well, Im dealing with bad guys and theyve made a lot of money through dealing drugs or whatever. Bringing Jenkins and his ilk to justice does not mean Baltimores problems are resolved. BALTIMORE A documentary film profiling Baltimore's police department in the wake of Detective Sean Suiter's on-duty death is set to hit television and streaming services next month. A still from "The Slow Hustle" courtesy HBO. 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. 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. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I got one officer down. 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. David Simon returns to a familiar beat for HBO, updating if not improving on an old critique. She grew up in Newport News, Virginia, had a stint in New York as a slam poet and recorded an album in London. Fenton comments: We have years and years of lawsuits, of complaints, of opportunities to catch them and it was this suburban drug investigation that led to them getting caught. I said, Where were you? They were working in the shadows, and deployed by the police department as another tool to roam the streets looking for guns.. Created by David Simon, this seminal series explores the world of crime in Baltimore through the lenses of both civilians and law enforcement. 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. This low profile helped insulate the GTTF from public scrutiny and allowed it go rogue. 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. Baltimore's largest police corruption scandal is in the national spotlight with a new HBO drama. We Own This City, the anticipated new drama from The Wires David Simon, cracks open the story of a corrupt Baltimore police unit fallen from grace. Jenkins brings Suiter along on a raid. You may know her for her role as a Baltimore police detective in the hit series "The Wire." We Own This City Review: Baltimore Police Problems, Rewired, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/arts/television/we-own-this-city-review.html. 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. Discovery, Inc. or its subsidiaries and affiliates. The GTTF officers provide additional damning evidence. Actor Darrell Britt-Gibson (Jemell Rayam) and technical adviser Detective Andres Severino sit down together to talk about the friendship they formed while making We Own This City, and how working together opened their eyes to new perspectives. Courtesy of HBO Max . The Bachelor Has Two Maryland Contestants. We Own This City tends to choose telling over showing, however, especially on the investigation side of the story. Over six episodes, host D. Watkins will share his experiences in and out of the writers room and speak to the people who brought this story to the screen. Through his early years on the force, Jenkins goes from learning how to scam the overtime rules to outright larceny. That case gives the series its shape and through-line, but also a relentless, repetitive structure. Watch these additional moments featuring Sean Suiter's family attorney, Jeremy Eldridge. This beautiful family who is patient and has faith in them, they really dont care. 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. 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. What, he asks Steele, is driving the polices actions? One thing that we all knew is that there were way too many details in this case that were conflicting. And I used the investigative journalists and their journalistic ethics and expertise first and foremost as, I guess, the first sort of filter and sieve through the facts. "Adrienne". 890K views 5 years ago BALTIMORE Two Baltimore police officers are on trial this week in federal court for some of this worst misconduct imaginable. Includes: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo - Brazzaville, Congo - Kinshasa, Cte d'Ivoire, Djibouti . Its arguments are bold and impossible to miss. The Wires Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: We are seeing multilayered corruption, Director Sonja Sohn interviewing D Watkins for The Slow Hustle. 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. And thats also once I found the journalists that were already working on the case, and they were interested in allowing me to follow them. German English, Vietnam Executive producers George Pelecanos, David Simon, cast, and crew go behind the scenes. United States A unit of the Baltimore Police Department, the Gun Trace Task Force, was supposed to target guns and drugs on the city's streets. 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. 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. In an act of radical transparency, the Baltimore police department hired an outside investigator to conduct a review. The Baltimore police department, recognising that the problem was perhaps guns more than drugs, wanted to have a smarter approach. Copyright 2021 NPR. [11/16/21 - 11:00 AM] HBO Documentary "The Slow Hustle," A Searing Look at Corruption Within the Baltimore Police Department After a Detective's Fatal Shooting, Debuts December 7 Instead, its members were convicted on corruption charges. 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. His report, published in January this year, ran to 515 pages and sought to explain how a scandal of such proportions could begin and continue for years without being detected. However, in this particular instance, the dynamics at play arent quite as clear-cut as that description makes them sound. But the character functions mostly to deliver exposition and make, or receive, the shows arguments. I had my moment of doing all of that. Actor, filmmaker and activist Sonja Sohn is the founder and CEO of the Baltimore-based reWIRED for Change, an outreach program for at-risk youth inspired by her six seasons appearing on HBOs The Wire. All those season-ending montages seemed to say: No matter how you feel about the end of this or that particular story, the beat goes on. info_outline, Hungary Four of them agreed to cooperate with the justice department and testified against the remaining two officers, both of whom were convicted by a jury in February 2018. Simons longtime critiques in many ways anticipated the protests over policing of the past several years. A hero 's funeral HBO drama family who is patient and has faith in them they. To give each month we all knew is that there were way too many details in this that... Killer, and some strong performances kick scenes to life the show details, in... 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