Jon Bernthal Cast in HBO's WE OWN THIS CITY From the Team Behind THE WIRE

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Jon Bernthal (The Punisher), Josh Charles (The Good Wife), and Jamie Hector (The Wire, Bosch) are set to star in the upcoming HBO limited series We Own This City from the team behind The Wire. Reinaldo Marcus Green has has also been hired to direct and executive produce the series.

The project is based on the book of the same name by Justin Fenton, and it will be a six-hour limited series “chronicling the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force — and the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.”

Bernthal will take on the role of Sgt. Wayne Jenkins of the Baltimore Police Department, “perhaps the central figure in the sprawling federal corruption case that centered on the agency’s Gun Trace Task Force. The plainclothes unit went completely rogue and began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a relentless drug war and mass incarceration in Baltimore spun wildly out of control.”

Hector will play Sean M. Suiter, “a Baltimore City Homicide detective who was caught up in the GTTF case and called to testify before a federal grand jury. Tragically, Suiter finds he can’t outrun his past.”

Charles will play Daniel Hersl, “a cocky, swaggering cop known amongst Baltimore residents for his casual brutality who was the subject of multiple citizen complaints. Hersl was effectively banned from the Eastern District before his move to the GTTF.”

This sounds like it’s going to end up being a great show! Here’s a description of the story from the book:

Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging, and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year, in a city of just 600,000 people. Facing pressure from the mayor’s office—as well as a federal investigation of the department over Gray’s death—Baltimore police commanders turn to a rank-and-file hero, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, to help get guns and drugs off the street.

But behind these new efforts, a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scale was unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city’s drug and gun crisis, Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. With other members of the empowered Gun Trace Task Force, Jenkins stole from Baltimore’s citizens—skimming from drug busts, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes, and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent. Their brazen crime spree would go unchecked for years. The results were countless wrongful convictions, the death of an innocent civilian, and the mysterious death of one cop who was shot in the head, killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify against the unit.

In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.

Source: Variety

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