And the rumors start to tear Baltimore apart. But day after day, the revelations keep coming. Baltimore and its scandal-plagued Gun Trace Task Force comes into focus in the documentary I Got A Monster, the feature directorial debut of Kevin Abrams. His elite unit came to be seen by senior commanders as a bulwark against chaos. Last. Podcast episodes are available each week right after the latest episode. She comments: Everybody walks away from the film seeing that the suicide implication is pretty serious and, if youre going to imply that, then youd better have really stiff, unshakeable evidence. Theyre a very private family. I think you identified it perfectly. And so it's clear to me this is another way to look at the question of how we're going to restructure a - how we're going to create another structure for protection and safety because right now, I'm not convinced that "defunding the police," quote, unquote, is really the thing because that's supporting social structures that support the people. The Slow Hustle doesnt deliver a definitive resolution to its central question. From top left, Daniel Hersl, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and from bottom left, Maurice Ward, Momodu Gando, Wayne Jenkins and Thomas Allers. SONJA SOHN: I think the one thing that I had to zero in on or hone in on was the fact that there - that this was a Black man who appeared to be murdered, whose murder was unsolved and quite possibly could have been at the hands of law enforcement. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Premiering Dec. 7 on HBO and its streaming service, HBOMax, "The Slow Hustle" is said to provide an inside look at the Baltimore Police Department by exploring Suiter's "mysterious" death and . How is this going to be investigated? And so being able to make that connection, I think, to those other cases was in the back of my mind. For HBO: senior producer, Sara Rodriguez; executive producers, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller. He enjoyed the admiration and respect of his superiors and was given special privileges. As of late March, 76 people had been murdered so far this year, up from 65 over the same period in 2021. That is D.s perspective within the film. I was sitting up at CBGBs [music club], the only Black girl with shaved hair, screaming, and I had a zine. English, Singapore Fenton commented: Every officials talking about reform, reform, reform and you think that all eyes are on the police department and everybodys behaving their best and yet this is going on. Instead, its members were convicted on corruption charges. While the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, after a rough ride in a police van, is not depicted, it hangs over everything here, from Black Baltimoreans mistrust of the police to the post-Gray work slowdown by officers. The creators, cast, and crew discuss the rigorous research and attention to detail that went into bringing this true story to life in Baltimore. Jenkins learns stark truths about policing as a new officer. Six of the eight arrested pleaded guilty to the charges. Rather than just railing against the GTTF, Watkins spends time discussing the numerous similarities he shares with one of the convicted officers in order to highlight how Baltimores problems are less about individuals than about the environment in which theyre raised and operate. In total, the task . Spanish, Colombia English, United Kingdom This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. All those season-ending montages seemed to say: No matter how you feel about the end of this or that particular story, the beat goes on. And that's where D. Watkins comes in to play - someone who's lived on sort of both sides of the track and having, you know, been, you know, a critical, you know, just a social critic and delving into those topics and bringing that perspective. This beautiful family who is patient and has faith in them, they really dont care. It begins with dramatic real-life body-cam footage filmed just after a shooting in the Harlem Park neighborhood of Baltimore. At the center of The Slow Hustle is Baltimore Police Department detective Sean Suiter. At this point we are less than 10 min into the documentary. HBO doc The Slow Hustle examines the mysterious death of Baltimore cop Sean Suiter, who was set to testify against police corruption and then was found with a bullet in the head. The editor, Donna Marino, she had something to do with that. Pelecanos and Simon also serve as writers. Jenkins learns his fellow officers are cooperating with the investigation as the full extent of his crimes come to light. The streets, the drug houses, the cops pursuing petty busts to drive up their stats you can almost hear the voice telling you to keep the devil way down in the hole. Suiter faces distrust of the police at a crime scene. Suiter died just a day before he was due to testify before a federal grand jury investigating an elite Baltimore police unit, part of one of the worst law enforcement corruption cases in recent US history. Oh, Lord. Over the years, as I describe in the book, it lost that focus and was just another unit of plainclothes officers running around the city. She is the director of the new HBO documentary called "The Slow Hustle." THE SLOW HUSTLE is included in a collection of four gripping documentary titles that debut on Tuesdays, beginning November 23. Underpinning it all is a Wire-style critique of institutions, in particular a police department so hollowed out by corruption that even the attempt to solve the death of one of its own is met with insurmountable doubts. The phones are smarter; the law enforcement machinery is not. The six-episode scripted series is at once an extension, an updating and a partial revision of their landmark dramas critique of policing. Actor Darrell Britt-Gibson (Jemell Rayam) and technical adviser Detective Andres Severino sit down together to talk about the friendship they formed while making We Own This City, and how working together opened their eyes to new perspectives. But then things get messy when it's reported that Suiter was killed just a day before he was supposed to testify in a case against several fellow officers accused of corruption. Ultimately, the journey reveals how theculture of corruption within the ranks of the Baltimore police forcecontributed to the destruction of the publics trust and impacted the police departments ability to solve a shooting deathof one of its own. He and members of the GTTF framed the two men that Jenkins had been pursuing by planting drug evidence. His report, published in January this year, ran to 515 pages and sought to explain how a scandal of such proportions could begin and continue for years without being detected. As new evidence emerges, the mystery deepens. We Own This City is still a very good show, with granular realism, a sly sense of humor and fine acting top to bottom. Spanish, Mexico A few days earlier, the 35-year-old Marine corps veteran had begun tweeting about his 11 years in the Baltimore Police Department and all the things he had seen that he now felt needed to be shared. Discovery, Inc. or its subsidiaries and affiliates. Was Suiter an unwitting participant in a scheme carried out by rogue cops? We dont always like what we see but we need to see whats in that mirror if were going to actually present truthfully in the world.. Funding social structures that support the people is just a given. I dont know about the soul, because Nicole is the soul of the film, or maybe Nicole is the heart. Jenkins brings Suiter along on a raid. He also learns a sense of entitlement; the seriess title comes from a speech in which he tells his cronies that as long as we put those numbers up by making arrests, they can do what they want. The mission of the Black Mental Health Alliance (BMHA) is to develop, promote, and sponsor trusted culturally-relevant educational forums, training, and referral services that support the health and well-being of Black people and vulnerable communities. And I have about as much hope that his death will be solved as I do the rest of them. English, Thailand Its arguments are bold and impossible to miss. With Jon Bernthal, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, Josh Charles. Like, even if youre a police officer, they really dont.. Late in the series, she meets with Brian Grabler (Treat Williams), a retired detective turned critic of the department, who makes a Socratic case that the war on drugs has failed. Wayne Jenkins, who as the real-life head of an elite Baltimore plainclothes unit turned it into a state-run gang. [11/16/21 - 11:00 AM] HBO Documentary "The Slow Hustle," A Searing Look at Corruption Within the Baltimore Police Department After a Detective's Fatal Shooting, Debuts December 7 Accuracy and availability may vary. And we're all not feeling protected nor served. The corruption has cost Baltimore taxpayers more than $13 million in settlements with victims and hundreds of cases the corrupt officers worked on had to be thrown out. Eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) were being investigated for a wide range of offenses, including shaking down citizens, filing false paperwork, committing civil rights violations, and making fraudulent overtime claimsas well as rolling around town in unmarked cars while wearing black hockey masks, robbing drug dealers of their narcotics and cash, and then planting evidence on them to send them up the river. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Jenkins Waynes. That twist alone makes The Slow Hustle a fascinating whodunit, and complicating matters further, it eventually came out that Suiter may not have been as clean as people thought. English, Spain ReBUILD Metro is a community change organization that revitalizes historically redlined neighborhoods of East Baltimore without displacing their legacy residents. The city knows that Suiter was going to testify against a group of corrupt cops and there is this history of corruption in the police department in Baltimore, then that lack of trust is amplified throughout this city., So the first theory that folks are thinking is, Of course you guys killed him. We Own This City is based on a book by the Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. Baltimore Police. Suspicions were aroused that a hit had been ordered to silence him. English, Denmark Many residents in the city, especially in Black communities, just don't trust the. And that case right there has a connection to many other cases that were in the public eye at the time. Washingtonian spoke with Sohn last week about her new joint. English, Taiwan Dominic West went on to play Prince Charles in The Crown; Wendell Pierce took on Willy Loman in a London stage production of Death of a Salesman; Idris Elba starred in Luther, Thor and Cats; Michael K Williams burned brightly in Boardwalk Empire and others before his jarring death in September. The program serves men in re-entry, addiction recovery, and veterans returning to the workforce. Next June it will be 20 years since The Wire began its sprawling Dickensian portrait of Baltimore, Maryland, as a proxy for the decline and fall of the American empire. In March 2017, eight members of the GTTF were indicted and arrested on federal charges of robbery, extortion, overtime fraud and selling drugs seized during police operations. And there was all of this corruption that he was around. However, in this particular instance, the dynamics at play arent quite as clear-cut as that description makes them sound. We Own This City instead works as a kind of appendix, an updated extra for Simon and Pelecanoss existing, well-earned fan base. As he notes, despite numerous different mayors and police commissioners, nothing much has changed in Baltimore over the years aside from the names of those engaging in criminal activity. But it is a pointed reminder that after all this time to quote a series that remains quotable for a reason the game is the game. In 2017, Baltimore was rocked by the federal indictment of Wayne Jenkins, a highly decorated super-cop and leader of. I need a unit medic right now. Sohn was at home in North Carolina when George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis last year. EN. Many residents in the city, especially in Black communities, just don't trust the police. I believe that this film substantiates further in a different way how broken the structure of law enforcement is. Detectives Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor. e was praised as a positive role model. The more I looked into it, the stranger it seemed. The Wire had built into it the distinction between good police work (painstaking, intensive, focused on real harm) and bad (petty busts and harassment to drive up arrest numbers and make politicians look good). I said, Where were you? The unsolved case also sparked far-reaching implications for a city already grappling with the complexities of policing in contemporary, urban America. This prompted an FBI wiretap somewhat evocative of The Wire. Their solution: They sold the drugs and firearm back onto the street. How do we measure that, how do we quantify that, especially given the deep-seated bad feelings about this department?. English, Japan There are poignant moments at the fallen officers graveside and at an anniversary vigil. But after meeting [Suiters wife] Nicole, and beginning to see that there were pieces missing in the investigation of Seans Suiters death, likethis is a cop. Officers tell me that its a new day over there and everybodys wearing body cameras all the time, which wasnt the case until pretty late in the investigation of the gun trace taskforce. As "The Slow Hustle" (2021 release; 88 min.) Once they realized that the rules that supposedly exist didnt really exist, its a slippery slope into saying, Well, Im dealing with bad guys and theyve made a lot of money through dealing drugs or whatever. You know, you cant have a badge on your chest and do things like that.. English, France So to me, that was a microcosm of the macrocosm. He was born in 1980 which, Fenton notes, means that Baltimore has been shrinking and struggling for most of his life. The corruption and civic woes the show details, as in much of Simons work (Treme, The Deuce), are systemic. 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