We Own This City recap episode 4

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“Say the line, Wayne!”

“Yayyyyyyy!”

I apologize for quoting The Simpsons, but it’s germane here. When Jon Bernthal’s gangster cop Wayne Jenkins drops the line that gives We Own This City its title, it hits like a bomb. He’s barely even pretending to be some keeper of the peace or servant of justice anymore; he tells the cops gathered around him that it’s all about the money, and as long as he keeps arresting huge quantities of people, he can make as much money as he wants. The city really is his.

When I think of how Jenkins is portrayed in this episode, I think of Henry Hill’s description of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas: “What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” In scene after scene, Jenkins makes out like a bandit. He robs drug dealers. He robs drug dealers twice, first by looting their car, then by going to their house and looting it, too. He robs a stripper, taking back the money he gave her and then some. He robs a couple of guys raiding a Rite Aid for oxycontin, then takes the drugs to his crooked bail bondsman friend to make money off the stuff he looted from the looters. He robs a dealer’s safe, then stages a video re-creation of the looting of the safe so that the missing money never goes in the public record. And in a sense, he robs all the other crooked cops in his circle by constantly keeping the lion’s share of each haul for himself. The dude just can’t help himself.

But it’s the larger community of Baltimore he’s really robbing blind. As he explains to his fellow cops, he can take an 8-to-4 shift, show up to work at 2pm, and still make enough overtime to nearly double his salary. Why? Because during the hours where he actually quote-unquote does his job, he’s constantly “hunting,” busting heads and making arrests and seizing drugs and guns and money. “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t give a shit about what we do,” he explains. “We literally can do whatever the fuck we want.” And then the kicker: “We own this city.”

And what a city he’s chosen to own. By the time protests break out over the murder of Freddie Gray by the BPD, you’re lucky to find one juror in 20 who says they’re willing to believe police testimony. Jenkins greets the protests themselves like an invitation to do battle, which he accepts with gusto, raging against the perceived injustice of fellow cops being indicted for murder and citizens responding with rage to the impunity with which the cops roam the streets.

Keep in mind that by this point, Jenkins has at least one death on his conscience: some poor old man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Jenkins initiated a high-speed chase over a narcotics bust, which is a) illegal and b) not an accurate description of the bust at any rate, since the only narcotics recovered from the suspects’ car were obviously planted. Even so, within a few years this guy is the golden boy of the whole department. It’s literally as if he can do no wrong.

And as far as prestige-TV bastardry goes, he really can’t. Jenkins is an incendiary villain, the ne plus ultra of police violence and lawlessness, portrayed by Jon Bernthal as a cheerily Luciferian figure constantly sucking more and more cops into his criminal orbit. To name-check another demonic figure, he reminds me of Stephen King’s Randall Flagg, full of idiotic good cheer as he tirelessly works to make the world a worse place. Never mind the fact that Jenkins might well have beaten the shit out of Flagg for the Stand antagonist’s anti-cop “HOW’S YOUR PORK?” button on his denim jacket; these two assholes have more than enough in common to get along.

The problem for We Own This City, unfortunately, is that no one else is nearly as interesting as Jenkins from a dramatic or cinematic perspective. This certainly isn’t due to lack of talent on the cast’s part. Consider Sean Suiter, the cop played by Jaime Hector, whose Marlo Stanfield on The Wire is one of the most mesmerizing villains in the history of the medium. All he’s got to do here is look vaguely disquieted by Jenkins, or by the behavior that produced the Freddie Gray uprising. The other cops and feds looking into BPD corruption are basically just a series of interchangeable white faces grimacing with each new tale of misconduct.

And poor Wunmi Mosaku’s civil-rights fed Nicole Steele exists solely to solicit exposition from the different characters she interviews. She might as well be a 60 Minutes reporter rather than a character in a drama. It’s a waste of a prodigious talent.
Then there remains the open question of We Own This City’s bottom line. After an episode like this—about how Jenkins’s rampant personal criminality found a ready home in the BPD’s systemic brutality and corruption, about how the Thin Blue Line formed a circle around murderers within the force, about how even cops like Suiter or the relatively honest Ward (Rob Brown) spent a long time keeping their silence—can you really make an argument that the police aren’t built like this, with these employees, on purpose?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Tags

• HBO Max
• jon bernthal
• We Own This City