English, Singapore Detectives Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor. Scenes for the HBO show based on Justin Fenton's book about the corruption in the Baltimore Police Department Gun Trace Task Force are being filmed outside the vacant Bengies Groceries in the 4000 . UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I got one officer down. Police stuffing their pockets and rationalizing it as their just dues was the subject of The Shield (itself inspired by a Los Angeles police scandal), which celebrates its own 20-year anniversary this spring. He was praised as a positive role model. Theyre a very private family. German I want to just give the team credit; theyve been making documentaries for 30 years. ReBUILD Metro is a community change organization that revitalizes historically redlined neighborhoods of East Baltimore without displacing their legacy residents. February 12, 20188:02 PM ET. She's also an actor. I was sitting up at CBGBs [music club], the only Black girl with shaved hair, screaming, and I had a zine. But day after day, the revelations keep coming. Except, as The Slow Hustle soon reveals, things werent as cut and dried as they initially appeared. Executive producers George Pelecanos, David Simon, cast, and crew go behind the scenes. Who did this? All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. It also tracks several local journalists, including Baltimore Sunreporter Justin Fenton andSalon editor-at-large D. Watkins, while they parse the investigation into Suiters death to its official andto many, including Suiters familyunsatisfying conclusion. English, Poland Nick. In the case of [the detective] Maurice Ward, he said it was an accident: he didnt turn in drugs and he realised that nobody asked him about it and then he sees other people around him skimming money and its like, Wow, we can do this and nothings going to happen. And it just escalates from there.. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE SLOW HUSTLE"). The documentary We Own This City draws attention to the corruption within the Baltimore Police Department. Fenton commented: Every officials talking about reform, reform, reform and you think that all eyes are on the police department and everybodys behaving their best and yet this is going on. That is the rumour that sweeps like a wildfire through the city and the fact thats the first theory that erupts says something on a larger scale about what could happen if the police dont get their act together and regain the trust of the people., Sohn adds: To me, what Nicole [Suiters widow] and the family are going through is the microcosmic example of what is happening to all of us, that when public institutions and structures dont get their act together, the people suffer and, in this instance, the family suffers.. Fenton comments: We have years and years of lawsuits, of complaints, of opportunities to catch them and it was this suburban drug investigation that led to them getting caught. To return to our unfair comparison, The Wire believed that systemic forces mattered more than individual failure or triumph. HBO doc The Slow Hustle examines the mysterious death of Baltimore cop Sean Suiter, who was set to testify against police corruption and then was found with a bullet in the head. He enjoyed the admiration and respect of his superiors and was given special privileges. 2023 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Actor, filmmaker and activist Sonja Sohn is the founder and CEO of the Baltimore-based reWIRED for Change, an outreach program for at-risk youth inspired by her six seasons appearing on HBOs The Wire. Focusing on the 1980s, the documentary tells the story of Michael Dowd, a former. Maryland State Senator Jill P. Carter helps contextualize some of the social and political misdeeds that have led to an environment that so easily breeds institutional misconduct. The Baltimore Furniture Bank is a nonprofit organization in Baltimore City, fiscally sponsored by Fusion Partnerships, Inc. A still from "The Slow Hustle" courtesy HBO. I Got A Monster (2023) Documentary Official Trailer In March of 2017, America's deadliest city was rocked by one of the nation's biggest Police corruption scandals. The results of this quest were predictably meager, and it wasnt long before pressure began to mount on Commissioner Kevin Davisfrom both the public and the mayorto find the assailant who killed this heroic cop in the line of duty. How is this going to be investigated? For me this case, and the familys position in this case, represent the microcosm of the macrocosm, she says. The six-episode scripted series is at once an extension, an updating and a partial revision of their landmark dramas critique of policing. The Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS) is the largest companion animal shelter in Maryland. Baltimore Police officers found guilty in Gun Trace Task Force corruption case. NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with director and actor Sonja Sohn about her new film, The Slow Hustle. Along the way, though, you got a lot of rich personal stories to invest in, which is how dramas with a broad social scope manage to succeed as both art and argument. Like many series right now, this one is using a nonfiction story to approximate the power of fictional drama. Sohn was at home in North Carolina when George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis last year. They are joined by longtime collaborators Nina K. Noble as executive producer, and Ed Burns as writer/executive producer. English, English Speaking Africa Interview The Wire's Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: 'We are seeing multilayered corruption' David Smith in Washington The actor-turned-director's new film The Slow Hustle tells the. Spanish, Brazil But the spirit of those protests also seems reflected in this new story. Many residents in the city, especially in Black communities, just don't trust the. Or was he an accomplice, on the take just like his boys-in-blue brethren? Spanish. I think of Baltimore as my soul home, Sohn, 57, says by phone from North Carolinas Outer Banks. HBOs We Own This City Production team is proud to be working with many local Baltimore non-profits to create positive change in the communities where we filmed. English, Israel Here, WWD looks at 11 new documentaries and docuseries to watch in December 2021. For every inept, violent Roland Pryzbylewski, there was a Lester Freamon, practicing the patient craft of building a case. English, Thailand The police department is now under federal oversight but the decades-old spectre of corruption lingers. Baltimore Police. The documentary focuses on Michael Dowd, a former police officer of 10 years, who was arrested in 1992, leading to one of . FLORIDO: The officer shot that day in 2017 was Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter. Bromwich, a senior counsel at the law firm Steptoe, says by phone: People were promoted without any sense of whether they would be capable of managing people. A 2016 Department of. Im still worth something., The Slow Hustle is now available on HBO with a UK date to be announced. Read on for more. This prompted an FBI wiretap somewhat evocative of The Wire. She grew up in Newport News, Virginia, had a stint in New York as a slam poet and recorded an album in London. In a war, you have enemies. Whatever happened to the cast? We are seeing multilayered corruption with new eyes as a culture. That case gives the series its shape and through-line, but also a relentless, repetitive structure. His book A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Soccer Team That Fought the Great War was published in 2018. But theres a lot of pushback of course. SONJA SOHN: I think the one thing that I had to zero in on or hone in on was the fact that there - that this was a Black man who appeared to be murdered, whose murder was unsolved and quite possibly could have been at the hands of law enforcement. FLORIDO: Your film really does document the Baltimore Police Department's long history of corruption. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. We Own This City: Created by George Pelecanos, David Simon. I felt alone and I was happy. English, Malaysia We Own This City is still a very good show, with granular realism, a sly sense of humor and fine acting top to bottom. BALTIMORE A documentary film profiling Baltimore's police department in the wake of Detective Sean Suiter's on-duty death is set to hit television and streaming services next month. As Nicole Steele, a civil-rights-division attorney, Wunmi Mosaku does all she can to create a character who feels her mission deeply and who chafes at her departments resistance to real change. He was born in 1980 which, Fenton notes, means that Baltimore has been shrinking and struggling for most of his life. His death set off a massive manhunt for the killer, and Suiter gets a hero's funeral. Sharp Dressed Man is the only program of its kind in the greater Baltimore area. English, Hong Kong Suspicions were aroused that a hit had been ordered to silence him. The Wires Sonja Sohn on her Baltimore documentary: We are seeing multilayered corruption, Director Sonja Sohn interviewing D Watkins for The Slow Hustle. With no reliable eyewitnesses to the crime, a harried if largely clueless search ensued, most of it predicated on a generic description of a Black man in a dark jacket with a white stripe. Portuguese, Brazil, Chile Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. English, India I was railing when there was nobody railing with me. Suiter died just a day before he was due to testify before a federal grand jury investigating an elite Baltimore police unit, part of one of the worst law enforcement corruption cases in recent US history. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. They connect people in need with high quality used furniture and household goods, helping them to establish a sense of pride and stability. Momodu Gondo finds himself in an interrogation. In July of 2022, the lead investigator into Sean Suiter's death, Sgt James Lloyd was sentenced to one year in jail for using his fellow policemen to harass a contractor working on his home. THE SLOW HUSTLE, a feature documentary directed by Sonja Sohn (HBOs Baltimore Rising, The Wire), chronicles the still unsolved death of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter, fatally shot in the head in 2017 while in the line of duty, and explores the ongoing speculation about what really happened that day. Documentary Crime After Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter is killed in the line of duty, the tragedy soon becomes enmeshed in a widening corruption scandal that threatens to unravel the public's already strained relationship with law enforcement. Director Sonja Sohn Stars Umar Burley Jill Carter Kevin Davis And I used the investigative journalists and their journalistic ethics and expertise first and foremost as, I guess, the first sort of filter and sieve through the facts. Looking for more? opens, it's "November 15, 2017" and we hear a frantic 911 call about a Baltimore police officer having been shot, and we then get the body cam footage as cops arrive on the scene. Simons longtime critiques in many ways anticipated the protests over policing of the past several years. Its that systemic rot which proves to be The Slow Hustles fundamental subject. What do you think, Sonia, the mystery of Sean Suiter's death and the fallout say about Baltimore and the public's relationship with the police as a whole? And so being able to make that connection, I think, to those other cases was in the back of my mind. The conflicting theories on his death speak to stark divisions between the involved parties an independent review board ruled his death a suicide, a theory that the Suiter family strongly resists. I consider Baltimore to be as much of a home to me as the place where I grew up in Virginia. On Nov. 15, 2017, Suiter was accompanying his rookie partner David Bomenka on an assignment when he allegedly spotted a suspicious figure in an alleyway in the citys Harlem Park neighborhood. And in a war, you need warriors. The Baltimore dialogue still has Old Bay piquancy, and some strong performances kick scenes to life. One thing that we all knew is that there were way too many details in this case that were conflicting. How did you, as a filmmaker, you know, distinguish between fact and rumor? info_outline, Hungary Its her second documentary since 2017sBaltimore Rising, which chronicled the uprising in Charm City that followed Freddie Grays death. Two former Baltimore Police officers sentenced to a combined 454 years in federal prison for shaking down citizens in the early 2000s had their prison terms reduced to 20 years each by a. What are little things like constitutional requirement such as probable cause or reasonable suspicion when Jenkins was quoted as saying that some of the advice he got early in his career was, Never let probable cause stand in the way of a good arrest? That says it all, which was the law was a pesky thing that you could ignore if you couldnt avoid it. Sohn was born to an African American father and Korean mother who met after the Korean war. They were veritable gangsters, and the fact that Suiter died in this puzzling manner a mere day before he was speaking to the feds about his shady colleagues raised immediate suspicions that he was actually the victim of an orchestrated hit. Filmmaker and actress Sonja Sohn of "The Wire" returns with the follow-up to her 2017 documentary"Baltimore Rising." The new film, titled "The Slow Hustle," looks to be an equally powerful look. There are poignant moments at the fallen officers graveside and at an anniversary vigil. He noted that the location of the lethal gunshot indicated that it could have been a self-inflicted wound, but later remarked that if Suiter was trying to cover up a suicide, he wouldnt have shot himself in the head; instead, he would have fired at his chest, which would have made it resemble a murder. 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