American Scandal - Police Corruption in Baltimore | "We Own This City" with Justin Fenton | 5

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Journalist Justin Fenton covered the Gun Trace Task Force scandal for the Baltimore Sun. He sat through the trials and heard testimony from accused cops and their victims. He reported on the ripple effects of the scandal, in the police department and in the community. And then David Simon, creator of The Wire, called and asked Fenton to write a book. Today, Lindsay speaks with Justin Fenton, author of We Own This City, which was made into an HBO limited series by the same name.Need more American Scandal? With Wondery+, enjoy exclusive seasons, binge new seasons first, and listen completely ad-free. Start your free trial in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or visit wondery.app.link/IM5aogASNNb now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. When the FBI arrested seven members of the Gun Trace Task Force in 2017, they exposed a massive and deeply embarrassing betrayal of the public trust. That betrayal became synonymous with the names of Baltimore police officers like Wayne Jenkins,

Mamadou Gondo, and Daniel Herschel. But the police department's issues ran deeper than just a few bad apples. The FBI had already investigated the Baltimore Police Department before, and the criminal activities of officers like Wayne Jenkins stretched back years, predating their involvement with the Gun Trace Task Force. Jenkins and his corrupt colleagues planted drugs and guns on victims. They falsified arrest reports. They stole money from the people they arrested, stole and sold drugs they confiscated, and they lied about what they were doing over and over again. This behavior came to a halt only when arrests began in March 2017.

The scandal caused substantial fallout. Over 2,000 cases associated with the crooked officers were affected. The city of Baltimore settled hefty lawsuits, and several members of the Gun Trace Task Force remain in prison today, serving sentences of up to 25 years. But also in the wake of the scandal, there have been real efforts to reform the Baltimore Police Department. And according to my guest, Justin Fenton, some of those reforms are beginning to show results. Fenton is an investigative reporter for the Baltimore Banner. Prior to that, he was with the Baltimore Sun, reporting on the story of the Gun Trace Task Force. His reporting led to a book called We Own This City,

a true story of crime, cops, and corruption, which was adapted into an HBO limited series. Our conversation is next. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of scandals and deadly crashes that have dented its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season of Business Wars explores how Boeing allowed things to turn deadly and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Make sure to listen to Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Justin Fenton, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

Thank you for having me. Now, anyone who's seen The Wire is familiar with Baltimore and crime. But how would you describe the city to someone unfamiliar with it or who only knows the city through its dramatization on TV? Baltimore is a blue-collar city. It's working class. The tale of two cities, as people often say. It's a very segregated city. There's a lot of inequality. We're a city that is known from the wire for crime and police. Certainly, we do have high rates of crime, poverty, blight, problems with drug addiction and violence. I think people who come to the city often, though, fall in love with it. We're also known as Charm City in the home of John Waters. We love the Orioles and Ravens. We're a complicated city. We have all those things happening at once.

So, without your reporting head-on, before you really dug into this story, I guess, what was the impression of the police force in Baltimore? You've mentioned that the city is bifurcated. It does have a crime problem, but did it have a police force problem? The Baltimore Police Department that I began covering was one that was sort of immersed in the crime fight. All eyes on the police department. What are they going to do about crime? That police were seen as the way to solve the crime issues, even though the fact that there were so many different reasons why crime occurs, the police were looked at as the answer for that. And over the years, we had no shortage of scandals and misconduct that would arise.

I think that one of the things that often was said was that, you know, these were bad apples. These were one-offs. You'd have an officer who was found to be stealing or dealing drugs. And it was always sort of put in the context of that officer was doing something they shouldn't, but we caught them and we held them accountable. Don't hold the agency accountable for this. There was also the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. What impact did this have on the Baltimore Police Department's reputation? Yeah, I mean, this took place against the backdrop of the national Black Lives Matter movement.

It seemed like in each city there was a tragic death that was galvanizing people to march, to protest, to call for change. And they finally felt like this is a moment where we're going to take charge. We're going to call for accountability. So when Freddie Gray was arrested for having a folding knife and running from police, he died in the back of a van, and people were outraged. The call for change. This call for change, though, did it change the narrative of bad apples, or was it recognized as systemic? I think that it prompted an investigation by the Justice Department Civil Rights Division

that went on to uncover those types of things, a look that had never really been taken. Frankly, I was a little surprised that it took the Justice Department so long to get to us. They had looked at cities like Seattle and Pittsburgh and even close to home, Prince George's County. They'd all been subject to these kind of reviews. And despite the things that routinely came up involving the Baltimore Police Department, that kind of step back look hadn't occurred. And when it occurred, it found all sorts of problems. You name it, every area of the agency, everything that it touched, they were finding these deep problems that needed to be fixed. And indeed, this DOJ investigation was happening right at the same time of the events that we

covered in this series on the Gun Trace Task Force. Yeah, that's what makes it all the more striking. I mean, this was a time period where officials were gathering sort of shoulder to shoulder and saying, we are looking into this police department. We are immersed in it. We're doing ride-alongs. We're in the station houses. We're looking through all these reports and doing the systematic review of the agency's day-to-day operations that hadn't taken place.

And you would think under that backdrop that it would be very difficult for people to be driving around, robbing people, planting evidence, writing false reports. It was just so stunning that that was taking place in that particular moment. So I think it's fair to say then that Baltimore has a crime problem, certainly in this period of time. And that becomes a political problem for anyone wanting to be elected or reelected. One solution proposed was to get the guns off the street, which sounds like a nice soundbite. In 2007, the Gun Trace Task Force was created. And I guess to the point of your previous answer, what kind of oversight did it have? Well, not enough, as we know.

This unit was created, though, with different goals than it ended up having. I think that the thought was we need to get people who are trafficking guns into this city that, you know, police have famously done car stops and jump outs as people call them when the officers sort of pull up and jump out of their cars and chase people. And that was one way of getting guns. But this was trying to be a more thoughtful thing where, you know, they would find people bringing guns into the city, dealing large volumes of guns. And that was how it started. It just kind of fell apart over the years.

I think that there was other agencies, outside agencies like Baltimore County Police and Maryland State Police that had officers who were part of it, which you think would help, you know, keep people honest. But those agencies kind of pulled out and really the Gun Trace Task Force reverted to, you know, another squad that was ripping and running as they call it. I guess the strategy then behind the Gun Trace Task Force reverted to, you know, another squad that was ripping and running, as they call it. I guess the strategy then behind the Gun Trace Task Force was akin to maybe perhaps drug enforcement. You don't go after the users, you go after the dealers. Yeah, I think it was intended to do more sophisticated investigations that would have higher impact. And how was the productivity measured in the Gun Trace Task Force? Well, yeah, it became how many guns can you get?

And officers who got a large number of guns in the agency were rewarded. Part of my reporting, I obtained emails that were going back and forth throughout the agency. And Dwayne Jenkins would crow about the number of guns his officers had gotten in a single night. And you'd see commanders replying and saying, you are a model for this agency. Getting volume was something that was celebrated. It might be part of that culture, the almost salesman-like appeal to numbers, that made the Gun Trace Task Force a place that attracted bad cops. Let's talk about a few of them. There's Detective Daniel Herschel, who stands out early as a bad cop on the force.

He was assaulting people, lying, planting evidence. Was he an early outlier or just part of the culture that almost was baked in from the beginning? Yeah, I mean, some of these officers were not well-known. They had not been repeatedly sued. They weren't officers who were well-known or in the hallways of the courthouse. Herschel was one of those officers.

He had been repeatedly sued. The Baltimore Sun did an investigation while I was there that looked at lawsuit settlements, and he was right there. He was one of the ones that they were saying was a problem officer. And so his inclusion on this task force seems like it was no mistake. I guess in a sense, you know, the numbers speak for themselves. If they want guns off the streets and they are getting guns off the streets, then it's hard to look back.

And no one was really better at getting guns off the street than Sergeant Wayne Jenkins. He had an established history of illegal activities before he joined the Gun Trace Task Force, so many that we couldn't even portray them all in our series. So I'd love you to tell us about the case of Demetric Simon. What was that about? Yeah, this is a really interesting case because I think it underscores how difficult it can be to sort of root out the corruption and find the truth in some of these instances. Demetrius Simon was driving through northeast Baltimore. Officers tried to pull him over.

They may or may not have been identifying themselves as officers, but he fled. And he lost control of his car. He crashed it into the front steps of a home. And he was arrested with a, there was a gun found under the car, a BB gun, and later drugs found on his body, in his body. He was convicted. He was sentenced. There was no complaint made, but it would come out years later through the Gun Trace Task Force investigation that the BB gun had been planted. Another officer who wasn't involved in the chase, whose presence isn't

even documented in any of the investigative documents related to it, he had been called to the scene by Jenkins. Jenkins said, I'm in trouble. I just chased a guy. He's hurt, and I don't have anything to arrest him on. And his sort of a mentor figure, Sergeant Keith Gladstone, drove up to the scene, and he sort of walked up and dropped a BB gun and kicked it under the car. And then officers found it, perhaps not knowing that it had been planted, but the gun was picked up and this was used to justify what had happened. Now, until this case, until people came forward and admitted what had happened, there's no way to prove that. There's no camera. You know, there are so many incidents related to this that just might never have come to light. So how do you think it's possible that so many bad actors coalesced

on the gun trace task force? Is it just simply that this was a place that needed this sort of initiative? And I put initiative in quotes, or is it that all the top actors in the police department who would be selected for an elite squad were in on this sort of behavior. Well, that's what some of the officers would say. Some, one of the officers in particular, Maurice Ward, you know, he said that this is something that you had to do to fit in that so that officers could trust you. You know, if they were doing something and they knew you were doing something, then you had dirt on each other and you could look out for each other. And again, they're sort of dealing in this quote-unquote gray area. There really should be no gray area when it comes to law enforcement.

And officers talk about sort of that in their role, there's patrol officers who respond to 911 calls and there's detectives who investigate homicides and robberies. But these squads, they were these plainclothes squads that were given the sort of free reign to find crime, to make something happen. I think there was a quote in one of the charging documents for a case where they even said that they announced their presence and said, we're the make stuff happen police. This is pre-body cameras. You know, this is pre-ring cameras everywhere. They're going out there into impoverished neighborhoods that are awash in drugs and guns, and they're told,

fix it. In that space, you know, they're coming into large sums of money. They're arresting people with thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. And they're supposed to count it and submit it. What happens when a stack goes missing? So as far as how the Gun Trace Task Force itself became so corrupted, I think it's really a perfect storm. There's officers already on it who were corrupt and doing bad things. And then Jenkins was put in charge of it and brought in people that he was working with who were doing bad things. And it really became this sort of super team of bad cops. Well, as a journalist, when did this super team of bad cops first make your radar? And the U.S. Attorney's Office, the federal prosecutor's office, they sent out an email saying we have a big indictment to announce.

It involves Baltimore police officers. And I went to the press conference, and they had these sort of poster boards set up. And it was immediately apparent that this was big. This was a whole squad, six, seven officers all at once, working together, all doing bad things. So it sounds like when it was first revealed, you know, you were a bit astonished. Was it the scale of it or the scope of it? What were some actions that you, as a crime reporter in Baltimore, might have been surprised by? It was definitely the scope of it. It was definitely the timing of it. An entire squad,

robberies, falsifying evidence, drugs, and then the timing. This is not something that was supposed to be able to happen when the Justice Department is breathing down everybody's necks. And it raised questions about how much that reform could actually affect. You know, if the Justice Department is here scrutinizing us and officers are still, A, willing to do this stuff and B, getting away with it, the audacity of it was striking. I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life you can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus

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attention by the revelation of the FBI findings. Let's talk about how the activities of the force captured the attention of law enforcement in the beginning. Walk us through how the task force's fortune unraveled. How did they get the attention of the FBI? Yeah, it's a really interesting story because this wasn't the result of a complaint from a citizen. This was not somebody going through internal affairs files and saying, I think we need to look at this squad a little more closely. The FBI really fell backwards into this actually through the work of local county sheriff's deputies and detectives who were doing a drug investigation. You know, they were investigating a drug organization operating out of Northeast Baltimore that was responsible for opioids being sold and overdoses in those

suburban areas. And they were sort of trying to track back the people who were dealing them. They put a tracker on a car and as they were going to recover the GPS tracker, which was appropriately used with a legal warrant, the officer reaching underneath found another tracker and wanted to know who it belonged to because somebody put it there that was not them. And as they looked into it, it came back because somebody put it there that was not them. And as they looked into it, it came back to a Baltimore police detective who was on the gun trace task force. And that led to a wiretap investigation that would uncover all of this. One thing that stands out, I think from the FBI investigation standpoint, was they had been investigating the unit before Jenkins became a part of it.

And at one point when Jenkins comes aboard, one of the lead FBI agents had worked with him. She'd interacted with him. She knew of his reputation. And she floated the idea that maybe they should bring him into the fold. Maybe they can tell him what's going on and make him part of the investigation. Others said, let's just see how this plays out. Let's just keep a watch on them and see what happens. And that was just such a pivotal decision not to bring him into the fold, because as we know, that could have led to Wayne Jenkins being portrayed as a hero who helped bring down corrupt officers, when in fact, it would turn out that he was the leader of the corrupt officers and one of the most corrupt in the agency's history.

But this wasn't the first time the FBI investigated the Baltimore Police Department. Tell us about the Majestic Towing scandal. Over the years, one of the more sensational scandals involving the police involved a company called Majestic Towing that had officers who were being paid kickbacks to refer tows to them. The police commissioner at the time, sort of in dramatic fashion, once the investigation had been completed, he summoned all those officers into one place and sort of took their badges from them one by one. It was framed as, but we got them. We arrested these guys. We're holding them accountable. But yeah, it was just one of many cases over the years that raised big questions about the amount of oversight of this agency.

Seven people on the Gun Trace Task Force were arrested. And all in March 2017, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, Detective Herschel were among them. As a journalist, what went through your mind when you read the indictment with all the charges listed out? It was shocking in its scope, the amount of time where it had been taking place, the number of incidents. Some of the dollar figures of cash that was taken were staggering. And these officers, they weren't afraid of being caught. They did not think they were going to be caught. They had been conditioned over the years to feel as though the opposite would happen at the trial. I think one of the final insults, if you will, to the police department was the officers who took the case to trial because a lot of stuff came out at that trial that would not have otherwise come out.

case to trial because a lot of stuff came out at that trial that would not have otherwise come out. People taking the stand and prosecutors holding up hockey masks and grappling hooks and, you know, brass knuckles and the amount of things that came out through that trial. You had to pick your jaw up off the floor. Were you at the trial? I was at the trial. Yeah. I covered every day of it. You know, I think it was really interesting to hear the officers themselves explain it. You know, it's one thing for the prosecutors to say the officers did it and put victims on the stand. But you had cooperating officers testifying as witnesses saying, this is what we did. This is why we did it. This is how we got away with it.

And this is why we didn't think we were going to get caught. As a journalist, it's imperative that you try to stay impartial. But what's interesting is what you just mentioned there was the enabling apparatus around the bad apples, quote unquote. What did you learn about, I guess, the sociological workings of the department? Some of the things that really stood out, you know, was testimony where an officer would say that they would seize drugs and then they would, it out the window off the side of the highway while they were driving back because they didn't care and how nobody really checked to see if you submitted it. I mean, the overtime fraud, we talk about the robberies and the drugs and the lying and statements of probable cause, but a major component of this case was overtime fraud

where officers would just not go to work during their shift. They had a shift that was eight to four. They would not show up and then they would earn overtime while they're on vacation. The Dominican Republic, it raised shocking questions about why they were able to get away with it and how these supervisors who claim not to be complicit, who have not been accused or charged with being complicit, and why they didn't do more. And again, a lot of it was that this leeway and trust that was given, the recognition of results over process, it's been going on for decades. One of the things that I talked about in the book was there's a phrase that someone used called the

cone of silence, that there's not a wall of silence, but a cone of silence where you see stuff, you're not so sure that it's on the up and up, but you also don't have proof and you're worried about sticking your neck out and accusing somebody of something. And then they find out that you did that and it doesn't result in anything. And a lot of people might just keep their heads down. I think from a supervisory standpoint, one of Jenkins' supervisors said that she worked out of a different location than him, that he would go around her. He had a direct line to people above her. He was a nightmare to supervise. And let's remember that Jenkins sort of went out of his way to build himself up and

to portray him as one of the department's best. He made sure everybody knew how good his unit was and how effective that they were. And some officers, one told me he remembered waking up in the morning and looking through an email where Jenkins' unit said they got five guns. And he said, you can't get five guns in one night if you're doing things the right way. But did he have proof of it? He didn't. There was one officer who made a complaint. He saw a fellow officer dining with someone he knew to be a drug dealer, and it didn't seem right.

And he said something, and it didn't go anywhere. And that's the kind of thing that causes people to sort of retreat and maybe not speak up. And the department in recent years has spent a lot of effort trying to encourage people that that's exactly what you should do. They instituted a program called EPIC. It stands for Ethical Policing is Courageous. And there's posters up all throughout the police department headquarters encouraging people to stop an officer if you see them doing something they're not supposed to. Report them if you find out about something that happened. Just an effort to change the department culture, because for a very long time, that is not the way things worked.

We've been talking a lot about, I suppose, the police side of the equation, the perpetrators, but there are the victims, too. And in your reporting, you spoke to one of them, Umar Burley. What happened to him? How did he reflect on what happened to him when he spoke to you? Umar Burley is a tragic case. He and a friend, Brent Matthews, were out in northwest Baltimore one day. Officers Jenkins and Souter and another officer named Ryan Gwynn spotted them, gave chase. There was a horrible crash in which an elderly man lost his life, actually a father of a police officer. He was killed in that crash. And again, it was one of these examples where the officers were looking for something to justify what they had done. You know, you chase these guys, people are hurt. What was the justification for it?

And heroin had been planted in the car. At the time, this accusation wasn't raised. Burley explained that he did tell his defense attorneys, but they told him that it wasn't a viable strategy. No one's going to believe you. He pleaded guilty and got several years in prison. Only as a result of this investigation, years later, cooperating officers were telling prosecutors that they had heard Jenkins talking about this, and Mr. Burley was released from prison. The judge, it was a very dramatic hearing where he was released. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Bennett actually sort of stepped down from the bench and shook their hands and apologized to them. They sued the city and got a multi-million dollar settlement. But money doesn't solve problems like that. Burley was deeply affected by what had happened. He was paranoid about police doing this to him again. He would get pulled over other times after his release and be very wary that it was another bad cop. And eventually when the lawsuit settlement was paid out, all of a sudden he finds himself with seven figures in his bank account and he gets paranoid. And he left town with his girlfriend,

believed that she was in on some plot to try to steal his money, and ended up shooting her and leading police in Virginia on a high-speed chase. He's now locked up in Virginia. You know, with the charges he's facing, he's going to be there for a very long time. You just said that money doesn't solve the problems or make anything better, but it probably causes them, though. You spoke with Maurice Ward, one of the Gun Trace Task Force members who were sentenced in this case. How did he explain his actions? Why did that force behave the way they did? Yeah, Ward claimed that he was trying to fit in. I feel like one of the more interesting things he told me was that, you know, he had this revelation about how little they were being watched when he one day forgot to submit some evidence, and he realized

that no one asked him about it. And so, I think he and other submit some evidence and he realized that no one asked him about it. And so I think he and other officers, you know, realized that if they were in a house in West Baltimore and there's money stacked up and there's no one around, they could pack it up and submit it or they could take some for each other. And I think a lot of officers describe this as sort of small amounts, you know, skimming, almost like a no harm, no foul thing. No one's going to miss it. And that once you get away with it once, it leads to more. So he wanted to work in those plainclothes units. They were seen as a good assignment. The officers given sort of flexibility, not a lot of oversight. They can earn overtime. They can drive around the streets trying to get guns and they'll

be celebrated for it. And in the meantime, on the back end, the people who are victimized probably aren't going to complain about it. And if they are, they're not going to be believed. Wayne Jenkins certainly expressed some remorse at his sentencing hearing. He was apologetic to an extent, but I don't know that he took a responsibility for all of the charges. What did he say at his sentencing hearing in his defense? Jenkins openly wept at his sentencing. He apologized for his actions. He said he'd done so many bad things, but he definitely was trying to minimize what he had done and sort of made a special point of saying that he wasn't the one who planted the drugs on Umar Burley. He said that to the family that was in the audience. To this day, I don't know that we've gotten a full accounting or reckoning from Wayne Jenkins

about the things that he did. Now, perhaps one of the better things to come out of this incident is your book and the HBO original series based on it. How'd that happen? Yeah, it's an interesting story. I had not really thought of writing a book, but I got a phone call from David Simon, the creator of The Wire, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, someone I've become friendly with over the years. And he said that he actually wanted to make a show about it and that I should write a book that they could base that show off of. So actually, the idea of the show came before the idea for the book. I was supposed to try to get to the bottom of this. Who else is responsible? How did it happen? And sort of chart out and pull together

all these years and years of incidents in this universe of people and victims and perpetrators and try to tell this concise story about sort of how could something like this happen? And then, of course, you have the very strange experience of seeing what you've written on the screen. What was that like? Luckily, I got to be a part of the writer's room. And I was there sort of as a factual, I guess, backstop. They'd say, what if this happens? And I would say, well, that's not exactly how it happened. It actually happened like this. And I was also lucky enough to actually appear in two episodes as a reporter.

I think I was playing myself, but I got to ask questions at a press conference, which was a really surreal moment. I remember looking around and so many of the details were just as it had happened. And people were saying lines that had actually been delivered at that press conference. On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant, Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly

crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season of Business Wars explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials, and devastating consequences bringing the Titan to its knees and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Now, follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Business Wars, the unraveling of Boeing, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Now, you've reminded us that Wayne Jenkins was on a years-long crime spree, and that brings up the question of what the legal ramifications are of this department's actions.

What happens when crooked cops fabricate evidence and put people behind bars? What is the other side of this for the justice system? Yeah, I think pretty quickly state prosecutors realized that they needed to conduct a review of all these officers' cases, although I don't think that review was conducted with an eye on overturning as many as possible. I think they wanted to look at them and say, you know, what other evidence exists? What other officers can verify what happened? And if we can't, if it relies solely on the accounts of these officers who are now untrustworthy,

we're going to throw out those cases. So there was an initial review of a couple thousand cases and ultimately 800 were dropped. Personally, I think that number is low based on the number of officers who were eventually implicated. I think that perhaps more of these cases needed to be undone. But there were some people serving federal sentences who had their time cut. They were released early. And certainly there was a torrent of lawsuits.

The city faced many, many lawsuits and settled all of them. There's a couple pending now, actually. But yeah, I mean, there was a major ripple effect, both financially for the city in terms of people who perhaps, let's be honest, people who maybe had their convictions overturned who are guilty. That's what it's something like this. The effect of something like this has, is it throws everything into disarray and up is down and down is up and you don't know what to think.

It's just a very chaotic fallout. Well, the fallout keeps coming for the Baltimore Police Department. In the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, the department is placed under something called a consent decree. What's that? Yeah, a consent decree is a tool used by the Justice Department to sort of require oversight. It's not enough for the department to be asked to fix itself. It involves a monitoring team of attorneys and investigators to sort of make sure the department is doing that. It's expensive, it is lengthy,

and it covers a lot of areas of the police department sort of changing the way that they do business and sort of evaluating them, studying them, making changes. We are in, yeah, we're in year, I think, seven of that process and we're just starting to meet some of the benchmarks that were set out. First, they investigate the department, then they implement areas that need to be fixed, then they've got to draft the new rules and training. And we've only been sort of implementing those reforms in recent years. And I think that one of the recent audits showed that officers were making fewer illegal arrests. They also reached compliance with transportation of prisoners. But there's a long way to go,

and it's going to continue on for years. It's also controversial in the sense that officers will grumble that these things, you know, tie their hands. And I know a lot of citizens don't like to hear that. They say, well, all we're asking you to do is follow the law and police us fairly without discrimination. And the response from officers is, but now we can't do our jobs. And this is a real, you know, challenge. If asking officers to police correctly prevents them from doing their job, what were we doing before? So it's something that we're still feeling our way through. And more specifically to the Gun Trace Task Force scandal, just two years ago, an independent report was released. What were the main findings there? interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of officers about the way the police department operated. I think that they found that there was this systemic lack of accountability of problem

officers being flagged but not dealt with, results over process. They found new allegations that hadn't been brought to light and additional officers who were implicated in things. One of the things they found was that the department had stopped doing random integrity stings. They also said that the hiring and screening of officers was deficient and that they needed to spend more time on training. They did give some credit to the efforts the agency is currently in. They said there was no heroes for what had happened in the past, but that there was reason to be optimistic going forward. One thing I'll note is that there was officers who were implicated who were not charged. I think that they cooperated or there was statute of limitations issues when they were not charged. And so there are more people implicated in this that have been

brought to justice. I also think in a certain degree, the public thinks there's more officers involved than actually were. After all these reviews, after all these investigations, they did not indict 200 people. They did not say that the supervisors were in on it and knew about it. That's not where the investigation ended up. It was about 15 officers, and the main takeaway was a lack of oversight, a lack of wanting to know. Do you think there's reason to be optimistic going forward? Are these recommendations being implemented?

That's a tough question. I will say that a lot of these crimes occurred pre-body camera. You know, we now require officers to wear a camera on their body to record everything that they're doing. And I think that that's a big deal, right? Even when some of the Gun Trace Task Force officers did have body cameras, you know, they were turning away. They were not turning them on and then saying, whoops, I forgot this stuff is new. How do you expect me to remember? And now everybody has them. But we continue to see examples that that is not a panacea. We had an officer who was just convicted where he was called to a report of a business alarm going off. He went into the business. There had been an

envelope with money that had been slipped in through the door as payment. and he picked it up and stuck it in his pocket and walked out. And it happened to be picked up on surveillance camera. Now, you know, if it hadn't, you know, who might have picked up on that? If the business had complained that officers showed up and money went missing, without that footage, they might have said, are you sure the money was dropped off? And how do you know the officer did it? And this officer, he was convicted for this one time. Are there other times? We don't know. He's a bad apple. He's been caught. He's been dealt with. And that's the kind of stuff that we were dealing with before. The fact that it

occurred is troubling, I think. So in general, I think complaints against the department are down. We have this rigorous oversight from this consent decree monitor, but an example like that shows that it can still happen and we still need to stay vigilant. The title of your book is We Own This City. And at first blush, it sounds like something that one of these crooked cops would say. But I wonder if you're asking a question, who owns the city? Yeah, I came up with that title. I'm pretty pleased with it, if I may say so myself. It was based on a quote that one of the witnesses in the trial said. It was a bail bondsman named Donnie Stepp. And Stepp was a friend of Jenkins, and he would help him to acquire items so that he could break into things and track people. And Stepp was involved with reselling drugs that Jenkins had taken off the street.

And Stepp said that he felt like the officers, they were in charge. They could do whatever they wanted. They owned the city. And that quote had stuck out to me. But as I did my reporting, I circled back to someone I had met during the uprising, the riots after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. And it was a young man who I self-identified as a gang member, a Crips member. When I had walked into the epicenter of what was going on, he put his arm around me and looked out for me. I wrote down his number and his name, and I always meant to sort of circle back to him. And I think

his number changed or something, and it just didn't work out. I wanted to tell that story of him looking out for me, and I tracked him down finally. And this was amid what was going on with the death of George Floyd. And as we talked, he spoke about how in his neighborhood, people didn't want crime and drugs. They wanted police. They wanted police to do the right job, but that the police needed them, that they aren't able to do what they need to do to help keep everybody safe if they don't have the trust of the citizens. And in that moment, I kind of saw that there was a double meaning for We Own This City.

The police department does rely on citizens, citizen tips, citizen making observations, working together with police to strengthen their communities. They own the city. And so, you know, I thought that was an interesting way to sort of circle back to that comment that had been made at trial. Well, Justin Fenton, thank you so much for coming on American Scandal with me today. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Baltimore Banner investigative reporter Justin Fenton. His book, We Own This City, A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, was made into an HBO Max limited series.

Next on American Scandal. In our next series, a charismatic lawyer rises from the streets of Chicago to the Illinois governor's mansion and has his sights set on an eventual run for the White House. His name is Rod Blagojevich, and his dramatic fall from grace will stun the nation. If you're enjoying American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at wondery.com slash survey. From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of Baltimore Police Corruption from American Scandal. American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker.

Senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Gould. Music by Lindsey Graham. Our senior producers are Gabe Riven and Andy Herman. Executive producers are Stephanie Jens, Jenny Lauer-Beckman, and Marsha Louis for Wondery.