David Simon
We Own This City Is a Comprehensive, Heartbreaking Account of a City in Ruins: Review
The Pitch: The tragic death of Freddie Gray in 2015 while in police custody was a watershed moment for Baltimore; Black communities and activists erupted in protest against the overwhelming presence of (and abuse by) Baltimore Police Department officers, who frequently dispensed justice at the end of a baton. And in 2017, the city saw the closest thing that’s come to accountability, with the arrests of the members of BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force — a unit specifically tasked with taking guns and drugs off the streets of Baltimore, but who instead used their institutional power to enrich themselves. Drugs planted in cars to justify arrests, seized cash going missing, violent crackdowns on anyone who looks at them funny: it was just another day on the job, particularly for the GTTF’s hothe...
HBO Shares Trailer for David Simon’s New Corrupt Cop Series We Own This City: Watch
You’ll never believe this, but David Simon has some thoughts on the Baltimore Police Department. The creator of such Baltimore-based dramas as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire is once again tackling the BPD’s corruption in the new HBO limited series We Own This City. It premieres April 25th on HBO Max and the first trailer is out now. An adaptation of investigative journalist Justin Fenton’s book We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption, the upcoming series follows Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), who according to the synopsis is a member of “a plainclothes unit that went completely rogue and began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a relentless drug war and mass incarceration in...
The Wire Creator Pulls Production on New Series from Texas Over Abortion Ban
David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is moving production on his upcoming HBO series out of Texas due to the state’s restrictive new abortion ban. “If an employer, this is beyond politics. I’m turning in scripts next month on an HBO non-fiction miniseries based on events in Texas, but I can’t and won’t ask female cast/crew to forgo civil liberties to film there,” Simon tweeted regarding his decision before asking, “What else looks like Dallas/Ft. Worth?” Some followers bristled at the writer’s stance, with one asking, “Were you expecting the entire female crew to need an abortion while there? This is so condescending to women and you don’t even realize it,” to which he responded, “No…I don’t anticipate anything other than that if even one of our employees requires full control of her own ...
The Wire’s David Simon Bringing We Own This City Series to HBO
For his next HBO series,The Wire creator David Simon is returning to Baltimore to tell the story of a corrupt Baltimore crime task force. Entitled We Own This City, the limited series is an adaptation of investigative journalist Justin Fenton’s bookWe Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption. We Own the City is set in Baltimore in 2015, as protestors demand justice for the suspicious death of 25-year-old African-American Freddie Gray while in police custody. In response to mounting pressure from the mayor’s office and a federal investigation over Gray’s death, the police department turned to Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and his elite plainclothes Gun Trace Task Force to help get guns and drugs off the street. Jenkins used this power to exploit the city, skimming from d...
