‘We Own This City’ Episode 3 Recap: A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of cops, it was the worst of cops. That’s the contrast established by We Own This City in its third episode, in which the paths of bad cop Wayne Jenkins and good cop Sean Suiter unexpectedly cross. But the unexpected team-up between Jenkins and Suiter—once old friends going back to their rookie days, apparently—reveals another layer to the show’s intricate interweaving of different plotlines and time frames. By now the show has firmly established Jenkins as a cowboy and Suiter as a straight arrow, in very separate storylines. Seeing them together as they raid a car wash that’s a front for a drug dealer has the effect of watching the stars of two different shows suddenly cross over and team up.

And you get a real opportunity to compare and contrast their two styles of policing during the raid, too. Jenkins immediately starts goading the suspect, and immediately begins trashing the place—with a crowbar!—when the guy doesn’t immediately give up the location of drugs or guns. Even as Jenkins goes wild, though, Suiter feels around and discovers a work table that feels heavier than it ought to. Sure enough, it has a false bottom loaded with guns, drugs, and cash.

Jenkins is over the moon about his buddy’s acumen, calling him a supercop and praising him to the heavens. However, he also immediately pockets all the cash they find, much to the chagrin of Suiter, who holds his head in his hand in dismay as Jenkins loads up on drug money as a perk of the job.

At the end of the episode we see the pair in Jenkins’s car, drinking in celebration. (Well, Jenkins was drinking at least, and of course he’s driving too.) Wayne offers Suiter some cash; it’s unclear whether or not he’ll take it.

Consider the way the show built up to all this. In flashbacks, we see a still-young Jenkins on the job. He beats the shit out of a guy for no good reason, something his supervisors make light of by pretending that Jenkins might lose his job over it before cracking up laughing at the absurdity of such a thing. (A cop, losing his job for beating someone for no reason? Yeah right, pull the other one!)

He starts to see how his status as a city-wide plainclothesman comes with perks, like a supervisor who’ll scoot him right to the front of the line as he drops off evidence. He notices how other guys with his job, like Hersl, seem to have money to spare while he’s still scrimping and saving. And he gets a taste of the good life courtesy of an ex-cop turn bail bondsman, who treats Jenkins to a liaison with a stripper in the champagne room. The incentives to steal are all right there in front of him; all he needs to do is reach out and take what the system has deemed is rightfully his.

On the flipside, Suiter does comparatively dilligent, by-the-books, intuitive police work. He connects the homicide he’s working on to a shots-fired report nearby, and connects the bullet and casings found at that scene to the bullets involved in the murder. Yes, he strong-arms the suspects girlfriend—like, literally, he grabs her by the arm before threatening her with jail time as an accessory—but no one gets beaten or robbed, and a killer goes to prison. As he tells his wife after returning home, it was a good day at work.

But days like that are few and far between when it comes to the Baltimore Police Department. Elsewhere in the show, investigators Jensen and Sieracki continue to put together their case against the Gun Trace Task Force, catching Gondo, Jemell, Hersl, and their commanding officer Allers (Bobby J. Brown) stealing literally in plain sight. Unfortunately for Allers, the guy he steals from winds up getting killed by his supplier for not being able to repay the debt. Allers had protested that he never hurt anybody; even if he honestly believed that, he was very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, Nicole Steele continues her investigation into Baltimore’s police problem, talking to various figures on all sides of the issue. A police union representative played by The Wire alum Domenick Lombardozzi justifies the citywide work slowdown by cops following the indictments of the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s murder. The new police chief protests that given the political and police instability in the city right now, he doesn’t really know who he answers to or how to do what he’s been hired to do. “You cannot clean the floor with a bucket of dirty water,” a poet tells her; when she says sure, but you can at least put out fires with it, he says “Not the fires in this city.” In this city, it’s barely dirty water and more like gasoline.

In the end, We Own This City is making a fairly complicated case with all its intertwined plot threads. You’ve got a police force widely reviled for its brutality. The outraged reaction to that brutality has so incensed the police that they’re refusing to do their jobs. The only cops still doing serious work in the streets are the most lawless and brutal of them all; they’ve effectively created a vacuum that only they themselves can fill, making them indispensable to the force even as they compound its problems with each new raid and robbery. The big question when it comes to the nature of American police work is this: Are cops like Jenkins getting in the way of the job done by cops like Suiter, or is it the other way around?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.