When screenwriter and producer David Simon talks about Baltimore, he doesn't just return to his hometown.

With the six-part miniseries "We Own This City" he also ties in with the motifs of the five seasons of "The Wire", with the unrelentingly realistic view of the street, the backrooms, the city and the drugs that characterized the series.

And continues to write, albeit with a different focus, the story of the Baltimore Police Department, the story of small successes and great impotence in the fight against social ills.

If that struggle was one of desperation, defiance, and fatal frustration in The Wire, We Own This City is the depressing sequel.

The Story of Total Surrender.

Harold Staun

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Novina Goehlsdorf

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper

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The case that Simon is telling about, this time together with the crime writer George Pelecanos, who has also written books for The Wire, is based, unfortunately, on true events.

It is so scandalous that there are already entire media libraries full of newspaper articles, books and podcasts about it.

Simon and Pelecanos chose the true crime book of the same name by Justin Fenton, Simon's successor as a police reporter for the "Baltimore Sun", as a template.

criminal cops

It's about a special unit called the Gun Trace Task Force, which was formed in 2007 to use effective means to lower the murder rate in the city: They were supposed to track down and confiscate illegal weapons.

In this respect, it was a notable success: instead of suggesting safety through a demonstrative zero-tolerance policy and mass arrests for petty crimes, targeted policing actually helped reduce homicides.

Unfortunately, the officers themselves acted incredibly criminally in their work: they searched cars and apartments without a permit, put money and drugs in their own pockets, falsified evidence, beat up suspects and wrote down overtime that they never worked.

The most ruthless of this team is Officer Wayne Jenkins, whose self-righteousness legitimizes almost any means, first in the fight against crime, then eventually to his own benefit.

For a long time, this ruthlessness was considered an acceptable side effect of his effectiveness: his successes make him a hero among his colleagues and make his superiors prefer not to look too closely.

Jon Bernthal plays Jenkins with a sensational sense of how his moral decline is also expressed in a physical transformation, in nuanced poses and gestures of arrogance and untouchability.

And a few old acquaintances from The Wire reprise their roles as well: Delaney Williams morphs from opportunistic Sergeant Jay Landsman to dedicated Police Commissioner Kevin Davis,

For the authors Simon and Pelecanos, the Baltimore scandal is the perfect material for depicting the structural problems of crime and corruption in a microcosm.

How tedious every attempt at even minimal changes is, can be seen above all in the character of the lawyer Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), who investigates civil rights violations by the police on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and works out reforms.

The concrete measures that are ultimately imposed on the city cost money that is not available for social projects.

And they only mean, as one victim of police violence replies with a shrug when she proudly reports on her success, "that they can now hunt us down according to new rules".