One of my all-time favorite TV shows is The Wire, for which David Simon was the creator, show runner, executive producer and head writer. Between that show and the podcast Serial and subsequent book Adnan’s Story, I was fairly well convinced that Baltimore had just about the most corrupt law enforcement and city/county government around. Then I picked up Justin Fenton’s book We Own This City (thanks to Random House and NetGallley for a copy in exchange for this honest review), and realized I could not even imagine the extent to which crime ran rampant throughout Baltimore, among both criminals and the law enforcement officers who were supposed to be protecting the citizens.

Mr. Fenton is a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, David Simon’s early home as a reporter. It was Simon who suggested the idea for a book that would tell the story of what happened in Baltimore up to and including cases such as Freddy Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. The book is superb, with a title taken from a quote by one of Fenton’s primary sources, a member of the Crips gang. Speaking about  the city, the gangs, and the police: “We still run this shit…as a police officer, you can literally only do what we allow you to do. We–as far as the community itself, even the drug dealers–we run this city.””

In Baltimore, in  2015, riots broke out across the city following the death of Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Baltimore police commanders turned to a “rank-and-file hero,” Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), to get things under control. 

Instead of taking down the bad guys, members of the Gun Trace Task Force did the opposite. They took drugs they would sell themselves, pocketed cash rather than turn it in, and planted evidence to get the convictions they wanted and to divert attention away from themselves. As a result, wrongful convictions were the norm, innocent civilians died, and one officer was shot in the head one day before he was scheduled to testify against the GTTF. 

An incredible amount of research went into this book, including extensive reviewing of court transcripts and interviewng people on both sides of the law. He succeeds in presenting the victims of the GTTF as sympathetic, despite them clearly being less than squeaky clean when it comes to following the law. He shows how they realized that it was futile to pursue justice, as the police would ALWAYS be believed. Just as in The Wire, the police and city officials were under orders to reduce their crime stats. As it turned out, some officers were complicit and many were willing to look the other way when it came to officer conduct. As long as the numbers were improving, everything was fine. Fenton gets this across without drowning the reader with numbers and data.  In the end, it is disgusting, sad, and eye-opening. The one ray of sunshine is the fact that investigative journalism still exists, in this case at a very high level. Mr. Fenton has done an amazing job. Five stars.