Book Review: looking at who polices the police in Baltimore
BALTIMORE, MD - MAY 01: Protesters march through the streets in support of Maryland state attorney Marilyn Mosby's announcement that charges would be filed against Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray on May 1, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray died in police custody after being arrested on April 12, 2015. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
- We Own This City
- Justin Fenton
- Faber, €21
IN the midst of this sprawling tale of wild police corruption and a city struggling to right itself, James Kostoplis, a rookie entrant into Baltimore's Gun Tracing Task Force, is posed a question by his boss, Wayne Jenkins.
"What do you think about following high-level drug dealers around and finding out where they keep their cash, and just taking it?" asks Jenkins, seen by many of his peers as a kind of street-level supercop. Kostoplis instantly replies that it's a "terrible f**cking idea", adding: "You can't wear a badge and be doing that." In the real world, it's the right answer. But in the American city of Baltimore, in this unit, it's actually the wrong one.
This fork in the road lies at the heart of We Own This City, a terrific dissection of the police corruption scandal which enveloped the Baltimore Police Department over the course of a decade. Written by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, at its centre is Jenkins, clearly someone with both a God complex and a moral compass missing in action, - if it ever existed in the first place. The Gun Tracing Task Force (GTTF), a plain clothes unit, was certainly successful when it came to seizing weapons, but its real work was enriching Jenkins and his colleagues in the know.
Jenkins and members of his team began with skimming drug money detected in raids but expanded to become what was essentially a criminal gang, recycling drugs and committing robberies. Its ultimate uncovering led to an existential crisis within Baltimore law detection, in a city already dealing with record-breaking levels of violent deaths.
Just like its fictional forebear, the ever-magnificent TV show The Wire, we Own This City proves that all the pieces matter, from the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, to the associated social unrest and the often-doomed efforts to correct broken political and legal systems. Wiretaps and surveillance ultimately undo the GTTF, but not before it undermines an already fading trust in a force trying to keep a lid on spiralling urban unrest. As one man is overheard to say on a wiretap: "Man, everyone's life is in danger. This is Baltimore City."
The scale of the crimes committed by Jenkins, and the sheer brazen nature of them, is jaw-dropping. He seems to personify that maddening hypocrisy which marks so much of modern life: saying one thing while doing the complete opposite, and to the nth degree. Before he effectively propositioned Kostoplis, Jenkins had told him: "If we're going to work together, I have two rules: We don't put stuff on people, and we don't take money." The duplicity is such that you can only agree when one person later asserts that Jenkins must have developed a dual personality.
What is as worrying is the ease with which he hoodwinked his superiors, who lapped up his greeting card-style emails, all positive enforcement and 'we can do this, sir!' bonhomie. He wasn't so much hiding in plain sight as not really hiding at all; people who should have been monitoring it all were too busy looking the other way. There had been warning signs from early in his career, but no-one pinned him down on anything, something which may have emboldened him further.
After Kostoplis gave his answer, his reward was to be unceremoniously shunted out of the GTTF. At the time, he was bereft, but in retrospect it was a win, given the sheer recklessness of Jenkins and his henchmen and the risk of guilt by association. It's not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Jenkins was ultimately nailed by a combination of outside forces and his own hubris. There's a sense that even as he careered off the rails, he knew a day of reckoning was coming.
At the core of all this is America's war on drugs and the policies which have followed it. Regardless of your views on decriminalisation or legalisation of certain substances, it's clear that efforts at crushing the drugs trade have been unsuccessful. Maybe that's putting it mildly. Drugs have destroyed communities and cast certain urban areas into a perpetual infamy. People are quoted in this book outlining how, to get ahead, it's simply easier to peddle drugs. This touches on family breakdown, intergenerational drug abuse, lack of easy access to services and education, systemic racism, and more. It's also clear that the surge in recent years in the misuse of fentanyl has spread beyond both class lines and city limits. Arguably, the US is now as firmly in the grip of a drugs crisis as it ever was.
The central thrust of a 'war' on drugs is also problematic, and Fenton's conveying of the befuddlement and political chicanery within the BPD across a number of years illustrates it perfectly. The drugs crisis breeds criminality, mixed with the easy availability of weapons. The police are charged with tackling this unholy trinity, but it's a 'war' - and bad things happen in wars.
The shocking moral and ethical void at the heart of the corruption wrought by Jenkins and his cronies is the most extreme example, but at the highest levels of the BPD, the entire enterprise is reduced to numbers: cutting the number of gun deaths, increasing the number of drug seizures, boosting the number of gun detections.
In and of themselves, these are practical and laudable goals, but the boom and bust approach to management means no single policy is given a chance to bed in. People boast about gun seizures but neglect the fact that many cases fall asunder before they make it to court. Someone is always being fired or heading for the exits, his or her replacement coming up with a brand new policy drive, ultimately reduced to quick fixes in an effort to buy time for longer-term strategies which never see the light of day.
Fenton's depiction of the workings of the BPD, across all levels, is one where everyone is jittery and vaguely panicked, like they've consumed a gallon of coffee and it's only 10am. No one is going to build a legacy on this crumbling platform, and so the cycle continues.
For a book which starts by zoning in on the crimes and misdemeanours of crooked cops, We Own This City is more a chronicle of the ailing health of American structures, a panoply of blunders, bluster and bullets. Its own structure occasionally creaks a little under the weight of the load, but stick with it, not least for the few rays of light that shine at the end. It turns out Kostoplis and his earnest response to Jenkins's invitation to steal is now something of a beacon for those undergoing BPD training. As Thomas Jefferson said more than two centuries ago: "eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty".
With this book, Fenton has done his bit.
