Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

3.5 "detailed, fast paced, disillusioning" stars !!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and both Faber & Faber as well as Random House Publishing for an ecopy of this book. This was released February 2021. I am providing an honest review.

I am going to keep this review relatively short. This was a very good to excellent compiling of events in 2010's Baltimore about an elite group of plainclothes officers that got away with many years of racketeering, false arrests, corruption and led to the ruining of many lives as well as the loss of others. This group was brought down by the FBI and most culprits have been locked away for 12 to 25 years. The focus is on Wayne Jenkins who appeared to mastermind and bring colleagues into the fray as well as protect some friends and family to sell the drugs of all the drug busts he had committed.

The writing is precise and logical and you can see in your mind's eye all that transpires over the years. The clear prose allows the reader to keep all the many subjects relatively clear in your mind.
This is absolutely excellent and impartial investigative journalism. HBO has also produced a six part series docudrama based on these events. If I see it...I will report back as an addendum in this review.

What would have made this a four or 4.5 star book is some collaboration with experts. I would have loved some in depth analysis of the psychology of the rogue cops (forensic and/or clinical psychologist), how a police force could allow this to go unchecked for so very long (organizational or political sociologist) and some historical context of how all these events were brought to the forefront by a local historian with a focus on race relations.

All in all, an eye-opening and truly sad reflection on Baltimore. Kudos to the author for presenting such a cohesive look at the sequential events that brought these criminal cops down.

Pulitzer-Prize nominated reporter Justin Fenton seriously delivers with his organized crime thriller We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021), to be published this month. Fenton’s book tells the story of Baltimore Police Department and the 2015 scandal that led to eight of their officers being charged with racketeering. All eight officers were a part of the “Gun Trace Task Force,” a plainclothes unit that was tasked with reducing the number of guns and drugs on the streets of Baltimore. Instead, they stole from citizens, arrested innocent people and then lied in court about these arrests, participated heavily in the drug trade, racially profiled and generally abused any and all citizens they came into contact with.

Fenton uses the story of one such citizen who was brutalized by the Baltimore Police, Freddie Gray, to frame and contextualize the eventual prosecution of the Gun Trace Task Force. Fenton tells us that “[t]he officers had carried out their alleged crimes undeterred by fact that the police department was at the time under a broad civil rights investigation following the death of a young Black man from injuries sustained while in police custody”. That young man was Freddie Gray, who sustained serious injuries while being transported in a police van. Grey was eventually taken to hospital where he lapsed into a coma. He died a week after his arrest. Fenton explains that some thought Grey had sustained his injuries in what’s known as a “rough ride”, a form of police brutality in which officers place a suspect in a vehicle handcuffed and without a seatbelt while they proceed to drive erratically. The death of Gray resulted in Baltimore Police Department being placed under federal oversight by the U.S. Department of Justice.

It’s important to note that the Gun Trace Task Force committed their crimes under this federal oversight, totally undeterred until another group of federal officers caught wind of some corruption surrounding the Gun Trace Task Force and were eventually led to the task force itself. Fenton relays that this has led many to believe that top brass knew about the corruption within the Gun Trace Task Force and tuned a blind eye. This context that Fenton gives about Gray and the subsequent federal oversight of the department was crucial for me as a reader. It not only allowed me to gain understanding about this department and their offences committed against the citizens they swore to protect, but it also allowed me to understand how easily members of the Gun Trace Task Force could have been caught. If the Department of Justice was watching the department after Gray’s murder, how then were they not discovered?

Fenton answers this question by centering this unbelievable tale of corruption around former Baltimore Police Officer Wayne Jenkins. Fenton provides careful detail about Jenkins’ upbringing, his time in the Marine Corps, and his early connections with people who would eventually become top brass at the Baltimore Police Department. His connections with these top brass members are a part of what allowed him to commit these crimes for so long, Fenton argues, along with his seemingly incredible arrest record and leadership qualities. Fenton says that “[i]n 2005 alone, Jenkins is listed in court records as having been personally involved in more than four hundred arrests, sometimes half a dozen in a single day”. Jenkins was also allowed to hand-pick the officers that made up the Gun Trace Task Force, and he chose officers he trusted to assist him in his crimes.

The biographical information on Jenkins helps the reader to understand how Jenkins’ persona within the Baltimore Police Department as a crime fighter and leader of junior officers was created. It also guides the reader to an understanding about how police departments are set up to allow corruption to occur. Focusing in on one officer and his web of corruption and using that story to illuminate larger systemic issues that police departments face is part of what makes this book so effective. The reader is exposed to the incredibly dysfunctional structures of police departments and the ways these structures encourage and cover up corruption. A comment that was made by the judge that presided over Jenkins’ trail speaks to this issue: “[i]f a sergeant is corrupt, is comprised, there is almost no way to design a system to prevent it”. This idea is one Fenton interrogates and utilizes as he tells Jenkins’ story.

Although Fenton uses Jenkins as the center of this terrible story, he makes a significant effort to include the stories of other individuals who worked for the Baltimore Police Department, or who were assaulted and abused by Jenkins and his task force. Ever the journalist, it is clear that Fenton conducted many, many interviews and tracked down any and all people who had been affected by these crimes. He includes emails that were sent from Jenkins to upper brass in the department, as well as transcripts from recordings that were secretly completed by federal officers when they got wind of the task force’s potential crimes.

To read what these officers were saying and doing while being unknowingly recorded was extremely shocking to me. However, it was not their corruption that surprised me; police corruption and brutality are everyday occurrences. What disturbed me was the extent and breadth of their crimes: they caused deaths, put innocent people in prison, stole drugs from dealers and handed them to other dealers for resale on the street, falsified search warrants and reports, stalked drug dealers and then robbed them of their earnings, and consistently lied under oath. What was also totally perplexing to me was that they were seemingly never seriously suspected. Fenton digs up emails from top brass to Jenkins that time and time again praise him and his task force for their work. Jenkins was even promoted to Sergeant while he was committing these crimes. The contrast here between a cop that falsifies search warrants in order to rob private dwellings while simultaneously being awarded promotions, new vehicles, better scheduling and more overtime was a contrast that took me the entire length of the book to conceptualize. Corruption this significant had to be allowed to happen, and Fenton’s book brought that fact to light.

Fenton elaborates upon the depths of corruption in the Baltimore Police Department by suggesting that this corruption began long before Jenkins. Fenton quotes one retired attorney as having said that “these cops put on trial are just the present tip of the iceberg that’s existed in Baltimore Police for decades. These cops didn’t learn how to trick it by themselves. They were taught.” The systemic nature of this police corruption and brutality are at the forefront of Fenton’s text. He tells the story of their corruption not for entertainment value, but rather to expose their crimes in order to connect them to larger issues of police brutality and corruption. Fenton’s book contributes substantially to the growing body of literature that exposes police departments and their very real corruptions. Because of its detail, its careful storytelling and its expert reporting, I cannot recommend this book enough.

Sgt Wayne Jenkins and his team in the Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore instead of taking down criminals did the opposite. They took drugs to sell themselves, took money for themselves and planted evidence to get the convictions they wanted and to divert attention away from themselves.

The local reporter that has authored this book has done a really good job and done his research. He worked in the area which helped but he has spoken to the relevant people involved or examined court transcripts. At the same time he has worked all these facts into a compelling narrative that in other hands could have been a mishmash of relevant facts that meandered. This reads like a compelling story but what is even more shocking is that it's true.

If you are a fan of true crime then you will love this book. Add it to your list to read immediately.

Baltimore, Maryland, USA. To my knowledge, this is synonamous with crime TV classic The Wire, the series that broke the mould aa a predecessor to Netflix crime dramas we all binge every week. With some interest, but little knowledge, I began this book in trepidation. Seemingly Baltimore has had race riot issues over the past decade the black lives matter movement could have been born there. Racial segregation, high unemployment, drugs, and a police force hell-bent on reducing gun crime.
So when you think of crime, corruption, drug dealing, and money laundering, you don't expect this to be coming from inside the police force, but that is what happened in Baltimore Police department. Justin Fenton's book delves deep into the Gun Trace Task Force that was set-up to tackle Baltimore's gun crime. Fronted by Sgt Wayne Jenkins and his team of plain-clothed officers, the task force was the city's crime-tackling heroes. However, they were all been skimming from the drug busts they made, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent.
This high octane hard-hitting true story ends with a litany of jail terms and a death shrouded in mystery that journalist Justin Fenton takes us through the crimes, the investigations, and fall-out with real gusto. The Wire may seem like a distant memory yet I think this latest Baltimore crime story would make a great Netflix documentary of mini-series. A recommended read from Faber & Faber.

We Own This City by Justin Fenton is the mind-blowing story of the Baltimore Police Department's elite Gun Trace Task Force and it's mercurial leader Sergeant Wayne Jenkins. Operating in plain clothes the squad had an incredible success rate in taking illegal guns and drugs off of the streets and were lauded as the scourge of the city's bad guys. What the authorities and the general public didn't realise was that,quite incredibly, these modern day Untouchables were also one of the most dangerous criminal gangs on the streets of Baltimore as they kept much of what they confiscated for themselves,then re-sold it, planted evidence, attacked,beat , terrorised and burglarised people. Most of their victims were criminals who rarely bothered to complain knowing they wouldn't be listened to,others were mostly picked on because of the colour of their skin. The book is the tale of Jenkins and his crew from when they were formed,through their reign of terror until their ultimate downfall when it became obvious that they were only part of the massive problem of a Police Department riddled with corruption and illegality.

This is Justin Fenton's first book,though he has a long career as a crime reporter behind him. He credits top TV writer and author David Simon for advising him and it certainly shows ,being very much in Simon's "true crime that reads like a thriller" style. I'd be very surprised if they don't find themselves working together again on making a tv series out of this story.

The sign of a good book is that not only does it stay in your mind when you've finished but prompts you to investigate it's subject further and I've just spent an hour online reading about Jenkin's attempts to get an early release and the latest on the mystery of Sean Suiter.

A great read,true crime book fans will definitely not be disappointed.

For a first book Justin Fenton has smashed it, his writing is uniformly gripping and its a pleasure to see how he handles a complex story of police corruption with a revolving cast of actors who dip in and out of the narrative. Impressively, he also drops into the narrative the story of Freddie Gray, the young man who was arrested in Baltimore on very dubious grounds and died whilst in police custody.

The reasons for including the Freddie Gray story are to illustrate the mistrust the public had for the Baltimore PD and to show that the plainclothes officers broke the law and acted with impunity against this backdrop.

It really is jaw-dropping to read time and again of police officers planting evidence, robbing the homes of drug dealers and charging around in unmarked cars jumping out on nervy gang members and drug dealers then expressing surprise when these people ran from them.

The story adds up to something very compelling and the complex rules, policies and justifications that Fenton covers shows how the officers were able to operate within the confines of their jobs whilst also brazenly committing serious crimes.

An example of the very minor end of this is the 'probable cause' required to stop and search someone. The officers in this book are adept at stopping people without probable cause and re-framing the narrative to give the appearance that they had cause. For instance, the officers would tool around in unmarked cars, be dressed in plainclothes and would not automatically declare themselves as police officers when stopping people. Jumping out of a car in front of an already edgy drug dealer or someone who is inherently wary of the police would invariably trigger the flight mechanism. The officers, seeing a person of interest up and run from them, suddenly had probable cause to stop that person. One man who flees from the police in his car is inolved in a collision where an innocent motorist is killed. This man then goes to prison for many years for doing nothing more than fleeing from a situation not of his own making. Its easy to see how the officers were able to manipulate and break the law to their own ends.

The books grips from start to finish and was clearly a labour of love from Fenton. He is an exciting author and I will certainly be reading his next book.

Recommended.