The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
On the beat with the rottenest apple
A jaw-dropping tale of a renegade Baltimore police officer makes ‘The Wire’ look tame by comparison
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Nobody who has watched The Wire will have concluded that the Baltimore Police Department is staffed by angels. But according to Justin Fenton’s new book, the real BPD makes its fictional counterpart seem as benign as Dixon of Dock Green.
Kevin Davis, who was brought in as a new-broom BPD commissioner in 2015, claims to have “inherited a culture that looks at accountability as a four-letter word”. The rottenest of the apples was Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, who in 2018 was sentenced to 25 years in prison for racketeering, robbery, illegal searches and drug dealing.
Jenkins was the BPD’s star “gun getter”, netting such huge hauls of weapons that his delighted superiors ignored his disregard for rules prohibiting racial profiling. If suspects drove away, he was relentless in pursuit of them – “like a Rottweiler with the pink thing hanging out”, as one colleague colourfully recalled. These car chases often resulted in the suspects seriously injuring themselves or passers-by, but Jenkins was always exonerated because drugs or guns would indeed be found in their cars – even if they hadn’t been there when the pursuit started.
Eventually he was put in charge of his own elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, and devoted himself to stealing from the people he investigated. One raid saw his men make off with $10,000 that their suspect had legitimately acquired to pay off a drug debt; unable to cough up, he was murdered a few months later. As for drugs, Jenkins is estimated to have sold $1 million worth.
The Wire’s flawed but decent cops McNulty and Bunk would have nailed their corrupt colleagues, but in reality nobody in the BPD seems to have raised a peep about Jenkins. He was caught after drug squad cops became suspicious and contacted the FBI, who brought him down following a long and complex operation. A final twist in the story was the suspicious death of one of Jenkins’s colleagues, Sean Suiter, the day before he was due to testify against him.
Fenton is a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun ( just as David Simon, creator of The Wire, once was) and tells the story of Jenkins’s rise and fall with the sober even-handedness of the serious journalist. He acknowledges that the BPD has a uniquely difficult job, policing a city in which the murder rate continues to spiral (as opposed to the
downward trend in most of the US) and the criminal culture is particularly vicious: he cites an instance of one woman who was killed, along with her husband and five children, for complaining about people dealing drugs near her home.
Nevertheless, Fenton makes it clear that allowing police officers to tackle crime in any way they like without consequences has been counterproductive, alienating the city’s black population even further. He also becomes more speculative towards the end of the book, wondering whether it can really be possible that nobody else in the BPD knew what the GTTF were up to; some of Jenkins’s superiors must have been negligent at best, but since there has still been no internal review, it is impossible to determine who gets the blame.
Fenton also interweaves another story with that of Jenkins: the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man, leading to widespread rioting. This places Jenkins’s crimes in context as one symptom of the institutional racism that bedevils America’s police forces. Funnily enough, though, because one has read so many accounts of police officers risking their careers and livelihoods to indulge in racist spite, there is something perversely refreshing in reading about Jenkins’s activities: at least there was a point to what he did, even if it was pure self-interest.
Still, there is no doubt that Jenkins is an evil man, and it is hard not to feel on balance that Baltimore is safer with him off the streets, even though his conviction has led to the
overturning of hundreds of the cases he was involved with, leading in turn to the release of several very nasty pieces of work as well as many innocent people.
Fenton brings some of the story’s minor characters to life more vividly than Jenkins, who remains enigmatic, but he refrains at least from filling in the gaps with pop psychology. His deadpan style is sometimes unintentionally comic, conveying a sense that he takes everything Jenkins does equally seriously, from running over somebody he doesn’t like the look of to fiddling his overtime. But ultimately the book is journalistic in the best sense, relaying complex information with exemplary clarity and telling the story at a hell of a lick, conveying its drama without recourse to camping or ramping.
Clio Barnard, Dark River is severe: dialogue is spare, even the clouds are portentous. Ruth Wilson is excellent as Alice, a woman who’s spent 15 years drifting from farm to farm, before returning to her childhood home in North Yorkshire to confront her irascible, older brother (Mark Stanley).
RUGBY UNION Six Nations: Wales v England
Saturday, BBC One, 4pm (kick off 4.45pm)
The Six Nations returns with unbeaten Wales taking on England at the Principality Stadium.
The hosts will need to be better than they were in the first two rounds, when they scraped wins against 14-men Ireland and Scotland. They hardly need motivation, but a win would secure a 22nd Triple Crown for the Welsh. They face an England side desperate to stem the tide after a home loss to Scotland and 18 leaked points against
Italy. Wales’s exhilarating 20-year-old winger Louis Rees-Zammit is one to watch having lit up the competition so far. Earlier today, Ireland take on Italy in Rome (ITV, 1.30pm). France were due to play Scotland in Paris, but the game has been postponed after their squad was decimated by a series of Covid cases.
SNOOKER Players Championship Sunday, ITV4, 12.45pm
All last week, the top 16 players in the world went
head to head, with last year’s winner, Judd Trump, going out in the first round. This is the final, from the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes.
FOOTBALL
Chelsea v Manchester United
Sunday, Sky Main Event, 4pm (kick off 4.30pm)
Thomas Tuchel seems to have steadied the Chelsea
ship since taking over from Frank Lampard at the end of January. The Blues are unbeaten in six Premier League games, conceding only twice. Manchester United remain the most likely challengers to leaders Manchester City, but must win this game to stay in touch. Leicester City play Arsenal earlier on Sunday (BT Sport, 12noon), while on Saturday, Man City
face high-flying West Ham United (12.30pm). Chelsea face another big test on Thursday against wayward champions Liverpool, whose dismal run continued last week with a loss at Anfield in the Merseyside derby (Sky Main Event, 8.15pm).
BASKETBALL Golden State Warriors v Los Angeles Lakers Sun, Sky Main Event, 1am
The NBA regular season is in full swing, with a host of games every day this week. Defending champions the Lakers, who looked unbeatable at times last season, are fighting for form after four consecutive losses this month. They face 2018 champions the Golden State Warriors led by Steph Curry.
GOLF Arnold Palmer Invitational Thursday & Friday, Sky Golf, 12noon
Grab yourself an iced tea and a red cardigan: it’s the most civilised tournament in golf. Arnold Palmer’s legacy tournament at
Bay Hill Club and Lodge, Florida will make you yearn for summer. Rory McIlroy and last year’s winner, Tyrrell Hatton, lead the field.
DARTS UK Open Friday, ITV4, 7pm
The FA Cup of darts gets under way at the Marshall Arena, Milton Keynes, with 160 of the world’s best battling it out in an open draw over two chaotic days of action. Michael van Gerwen returns to defend his title.
A refreshing selection from the subtly surreal Irish comedian’s 2015 stand-up tour, covering subjects from Islamic State and snacking habits (“say what you like about fundamentalist death cults, they go very well with the heavier cheddars”) to the upsides of bad television and self-loathing. GO
Channel 5, 10pm
Matt Cottingham’s documentary offers a brisk survey of the highest peak in the world, the various attempts to scale it, and how it continues to claim lives as the numbers of tourists hoping to summit its peak swells each year. GT
Channel 5, 10.30pm
Somewhat less powerful than the earlier Ripper programme, this is a by-the-numbers look at events leading up to murder, following both the victim’s last hours and the killer’s. SH