‘We Own This City’: Can a show about corruption lead to better policing?

After the critical acclaim of “The Wire,” it was always going to take a huge story for its creator, David Simon, to return to the world of crime, drugs, and the Baltimore Police Department.

But when the real-life corruption scandal of the city’s Gun Trace Task Force was exposed in the spring of 2017, Mr. Simon didn’t immediately see the criminal acts of the officers as a television show. Instead, he called Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton and told him, “This is a book. You need to step back and gather up your reporting,” Mr. Simon, who used to have the same beat at the paper,