InWe Own This City, David Simon and George Pelecanos argue police corruption has never been worse.
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We Own This Cityfeels like a return.
That was the truth, Simon tells me.
Things have changed, he says, and he considersWe Own This Citya reflection of that.
A police department is a living, breathing institution that gets better or worse, Simon says.
But you had to convince David to go back to a setting so similar toThe Wire.
David, why were you reluctant?Simon:I had other stuff on my plate.
I was reading it contemporaneously with Justins reporting.
I gave him the number of my book agent.
I was thinking journalistically; I wasnt thinking,and then well option it.
I didnt think about it again until George walked in with an early version of the manuscript.
I wasnt in the mode to look back.
After so many years together, George is entitled to have me listen.
And he was right.
Its notThe Wirein any sense, but it is a coda.
It didnt feel like we were going back to the same dance.
Somebody has to do something.
It cant just stay the way it is.
I dont think thats just because I was trained as a journalist.
If youre writing something political, girding yourself in facts is only an asset.
We showed you cops shoving cash into their raid jackets; we showed you randomized brutalities on the street.
We broke a kids fingers for stealing a car.
We took into account the inherent flaws, but it was fictional.
And I thought to myself,Okay.
Thats the industry Im in.
Pelecanos:And it wasnt the easy road.
Yes, it does seem much harder, in many ways.Pelecanos:It presented more of a challenge.
You have to honor the facts and you have to be careful.
These people may have died but their families are still here.
Youcanlibel felons doing time, but that doesnt mean youshouldlibel them.
It was a lot more work to do it this way, but its a lot more rewarding.
Simon:Reality never gives you the perfect narrative.
In some ways thats interesting on a storytelling level: What can you say, whats fair to say?
But also, you have two people who went into a room.
Its not a documentary, were not journalists.
But neither do we feel like we have permission to have everybody say the best possible line.
A lot of the dialogueisin court transcripts or on the wiretaps.
But thats what happened.
Of course itd be more dramatic if we did ten hours of them browbeating.
But we had to honor the facts.
Simon:As soon as they were caught, they turned on each other with abandon.
I was thinking about that with the wiretaps in this series.
OnThe Wire, there are elaborate codes and it takes forever to crack the system.
But theres another part, which is, sometimes people genuinely remember it differently.
Do I have an opinion?
But we dont show you the independent review a year later, or the autopsy, or the ballistics.
We dont go to every piece of evidence to convince you.
We have to leave you in some place where people are still going to argue about it.
I dont think theyshould, but they will.
And that was Georges idea, that we should just show the known in the moment.
Was there debate about it?
And the gun is underneath him; the gun fell with him.
Right away, the detectives had very grave doubts that there was an assailant.
For us, it was like, is it a bridge too far to introduce that much evidence?
In the immediate aftermath of this cop being shot, it may not have been that cogent.
In reality, it was chaos.
Were threading the needle between so many ethical [choices].
Can we provide that much guidance for the viewer?
How much was known in the end?
Pelecanos:David and I dont really see each other much when were making these shows.
Simon:Divide and conquer.
Pelecanos:Its logistics.
One of us is on set and the other is doing rewrites.
So a lot of this deliberation happens in the editing room.
Thats when David and I decide whats going to be included.
Thats where this stuff was discussed most intensely.
Thats the fun of it.
Youre fully engaged with trying to find your way to some proximate version of whats true.
Theres always the … oh God, am I about to quote Rumsfeld?
Known unknowns?Simon:Jesus.
Jamie Hector, for example, plays Sean Suiter, a cop struggling to do the right thing.
But inThe Wire, he was Marlo Stanfield, the coldest, least compassionate drug dealer.
Thats the only case I can think where it straddled the line, but it made sense.
Simon:I didnt think that was Herc or that any of them were the same character.
Look, good actors gotta work.
People are interchangeable within systems.
That is the political reference point: Whats going on is systemic.
There are shows thatve done the bad-cop anti-hero, and its been laid out like a banquet.
Are they going to catch the bad cop?
How will they catch him?
How many people will he take down with him?
I dont really give a shit.
What Im interested in is, how did this become policing in Baltimore?
The why is way more interesting than the who, what, when.
But I dont think its a conscious thought when people are watching the show.
George and I are looking through the monitor.
All were seeing is good performances.
But theyre also our point of view in the show.Simon:Yeah, and you go along with it.
What does that say?
But Simon:But that was the truth!
There was no,were going to hit you until youre in cuffs.
They were going to hit you all the way into the wagon.
These cops came on a generation, generation and a half later.
Even the earliest of them did not make it into plainclothes work untilThe Wirehad shot its bolt.
Its not the same department, in 1995 or 2005, as it is today.
And that goes back to the 1850s.
The last generation of police, its been transformative.
The cops were slow to realize they couldnt keep doing the shit they used to do.
We always knew brutality was around, as a police reporter.
But in terms of corruption, no.
You could only do three years in a vice unit and then you had to transfer out.
The department before then was one of the most corrupt in the country.
When they gave up on that, that was a tell.
It doesnt stay constant.
That was the result of an actress who came forward and said, Im not really comfortable.
We welcomed it thats a relief.
It takes the onus off us to figure out how to do it properly.
Not just our main cast, but our background people and extras.
We shoot in neighborhoods primarily; we dont use stages.
People were coming out of their houses to say, Hersl kicked my ass or Jenkins robbed me.
Id never experienced anything like that.
We needed the support to shoot this stuff.
Its a good thing, the changes that have happened.
George, and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane.
I had some consciousness of diversity.
Dave had a development deal somewhere else and didnt want to write cable.
But the truth was, we didnt do a great job of being diverse in the writers room.
But its better for the industry as a whole, certainly.
We scripted the cut back and forth to the brutalization.
I came up with the idea of revisiting that, I think.
Those two things became our emotional bookends.
Is the cop kicking his ass because hes fighting a fight hes supposed to win?
Or is the cop kicking his ass because he wants to kick his ass?
Both things look the same when youre in the middle of them.
Pelecanos:We let these guys make their case also.
These are valid arguments.
The first time I saw it was when he wrote it and I read the script.
Its the kind of thing where its possible it doesnt work.
But it did work, in spades.
Simon:This cant end well.
Youve called this a coda, rather than a sequel.
But it seemed worth doing.
As to whether wed do something again, I now defer to George.
You opened the door, buddy.
Pelecanos:I like shooting in Baltimore.
Theres no question that I would return, although it probably wouldnt be in this arena.
Actually … thats a solid idea.
Simon:Youd shoot the hell out of that, George.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
