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Twenty years following the first episode of “The Wire”, David Simon and George Pelecanos return for OCS to the big city of Maryland plagued by drugs and institutional racism to retrace, in a new series, the Wayne Jenkins affair, symptomatic of the American police excesses.
The stunning first scene of We Own This City is observed from the passenger compartment of a car. On the way to her office, a civil rights lawyer observes two white police officers on a black man pinned to the ground. Aimed at them, the tide of telephones from a vociferous crowd. Intimidated, the officers release the individual they were trying to handcuff and let go: «Police yourself !» All at once “stand still” et “do it yourself, the police”. Emblematic scene of what has most ostensibly changed the past decade in police repression in the United States and the balance of power between the people and the institutions: videos that testify to abuses and blunders are no longer the exception, like in the days of Rodney King, but part and parcel of a system of widespread intemperance and defiance, which seems increasingly inextricable – a literally infernal cycle, in which police brutality and criminality work hand in hand to erode society. This is what is at stake in the Wayne Jenkins affair, at the heart of We Own This Cityinvestigative book by Justin Fenton, journalist at Baltimore Sunwhere once officiated …
