Tom's guest today is Justin Fenton, who covers crime and police accountability for the Baltimore Sun. Under the best of circumstances, those are two distinct beats. But for the last four years, Fenton has been covering one the biggest policing scandals in American history, in which the criminals were cops.
The Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force was created in 2007, designed as an elite, plainclothes unit that would excise guns from city streets. The GTTF came to international attention when it was exposed as a criminal enterprise that had thrived for years, undetected and even celebrated by the senior leadership in the BPD.
The scope of their malfeasance continues to unfold, and the ramifications of it, in terms of past convictions and future prosecutions, are significant. In Justin Fenton’s telling in his assiduously reported book, the story is as riveting as it is horrifying. The book is called We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption.
Justin Fentonjoins us on Zoom…
