HBO Revisits the Baltimore Uprising

As the Baltimore police department contends with back-to-back years of record-high homicide rates, it’s also dealing with its own internal strife: police caught on body camera planting drugs on suspects, surfaced corruption among the police department’s elite Gun Trace Task Force, and a fight between Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan over how to fight crime. Going further back, there’s also a damning U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the police department and its consent decree, and, of course, the ongoing fallout from the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody in 2015. Meanwhile, President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions continue to instigate more police violence and posterchild Baltimore as a city out of control. It’s quite a bit to unravel.

But in many ways, Gray is the cynosure for Baltimore’s criminal justice woes. It’s from this tension that Baltimore Rising, an HBO documentary directed by actress/filmmaker Sonja Sohn (who played a homicide detective on the Baltimore-set HBO series “The Wire”) was created. It follows the work of several activists in Baltimore through the post-riot fog, when everyone in the city—from the mayor and police chief on down—seemed to know that something needed to be done to rein in police violence, but no one was sure exactly what. Activists roam the streets, the city council chambers, and state legislative chambers exploring what police reforms are possible and launching demands accordingly. Mostly what they want is accountability from the police.