This low profile helped insulate the GTTF from public scrutiny – and allowed it go rogue. They were working in the shadows, and deployed by the police department as another tool to roam the streets looking for guns.” It wasn’t that we heard about them all the time. They didn’t trot these guys out for press conferences. “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. It wasn’t a very large initiative, just a handful of officers, a single unit, and they went about their work with little fanfare. The Baltimore police department, recognising that the problem was perhaps guns more than drugs, wanted to have a smarter approach.

Fenton writes that the police commissioner Frederick Bealefield insisted that police were not going after everyone in Baltimore any more, just “bad guys with guns”.įenton explains in a phone interview from Baltimore: “It started as a way to try to do more sophisticated gun trafficking cases. It tells how a shift in policing strategy in 2007 led to the creation of the GTTF amid concern that police had spent too long pursuing drugs rather than guns. But unlike that venerated saga, We Own This City is based on the true story told in the journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book of the same name.

The series was shot in Baltimore and brings together several alumni of the The Wire, both on screen and behind the camera, including David Simon and George Pelecanos.

Justin fenton books