‘We Own This City’ Ending Explained: Jon Bernthal, David Simon, and More Answer Your Burning Questions

Even though we’ve known for weeks that Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson) and the rest of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force were guilty of horrendous crimes, the ending of HBO‘s We Own This City still found a way to devastate us. The show’s final episode reveals how the FBI finally caught the GTFF’s crooked cops and how one detective we hoped was straight might not have been as good as we thought.

We Own This City ends with Detective Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector) seemingly staging his own death suicide when he realizes that he might be implicated in the GTTF’s crimes. Was he guilty? Was he innocent? Did he stage his own death? What really happened? We Own This City‘s showrunners George Pelecanos and David Simon purposely leave Suiter’s end ambiguous. So what should viewers take away from it?

And how should we feel about We Own This City‘s final moments? As we follow Wayne Jenkins into prison, we not only see him defiantly convinced of his own innocence, but he imagines himself leading a classroom full of entranced cops. It’s a replay of the show’s opening sequence, but instead of a room of rookies, Jenkins is hyping up the officers we’ve spent the most time with throughout the series, including Hersl, Suiter, Rayam, and the rest of the GTTF.

So what should we make of HBO’s We Own This City? Let’s go to the showrunners and stars to find out…

We Own This City Ending Explained: Did Sean Suiter Stage His Own Death? And Was He a Crooked Cop After All?

Throughout We Own This City, Sean Suiter has been held up as an example of a cop who wants to do the right thing. The question the show leaves us with, though, is whether or not he broke the law. As the FBI’s investigation tightens around all of Jenkins’ associates, Suiter’s past with the crooked cop is called into question. The show pointedly never revealed if he took the money Jenkins offered him after a job. However the day before Suiter would be called into testify about his time with Jenkins, he suspiciously dies in the line of duty.

Was it an accident? Or, like the show suggests, did Suiter decide to fall on his proverbial sword rather than let himself be exposed as a crooked cop?

“One thing that I do love about this material is that we talk about things that we know the answer to,” Actor Jamie Hector told Decider. “When it comes down to Sean, why you don’t have the answer to it is because there are no answers to it. You know, we don’t know. So because I didn’t know how [exactly he died], I approached it in that way. What happened when we went to that alley? I can’t give you a definite answer.
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“So what I do know is what he was doing before. What I do know is who he loved on before, who we spoke to a couple of hours, if not 15 to 20 minutes before. His wife, his lawyer. His pacing back and forth, his partner. So all of these things that we do know, you’ll see.”

When Decider asked We Own This City‘s showrunners if they considered Suiter a good cop or bad cop, George Pelecanos said, “I mean, I would say he’s wasn’t good or bad, you know what I mean?

“You almost expect some police to take a little money here and there. You know, you pull the guy over and you find some drug money in the car. 
And you know, if it’s $500, you split up $400 in the alley with the other guys in your squad.”

That said, Pelecanos wanted to make it clear he didn’t lump Suiter in with the rest of the GTTF. “Sean Suiter didn’t sell drugs on the street. He didn’t do home invasions. He didn’t do a lot what these other guys were doing.”

David Simon told Decider that Suiter was definitely going to lose his job after the Grand Jury testimony. The investigators involved certainly made that clear to Suiter ahead of time.

“What I actually think is there’s sufficient Grand Jury testimony and there’s sufficient logic to suggest early in his career Officer Suiter took money and there’s more than enough indication that his death was a suicide,” Simon said. “Having said that, you can count that as only my opinion.”

Simon said that his opinion came from walking the ground with the independent investigator, reading through the entire police report, and looking at both the case file and physical evidence.

Still, it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves what to make of Sean Suiter’s career and his death.

Behind-the-Scenes of We Own This City‘s Final Scene

We Own This City doesn’t end with Sean Suiter’s story, but Wayne Jenkins. The ringleader of all of the GTTF’s crimes refused to bargain with prosecutors, resulting in Jenkins getting the longest sentence. However even behind bars, Jenkins was defiant. He called himself the best cop Baltimore had and fantasizes about preaching his policing philosophy in front of a room full of the characters we’ve followed throughout We Own This City.

“I think when you’re dealing with issues that are this complicated and nuanced, you gotta get granular and you gotta get specific. You gotta dive into the messiness of that. The complication of that,” Jon Bernthal told Decider.

“I think when you look at Wayne Jenkins, let’s just take a look at his reaction.
 The same man stood up in court and cried his eyes out saying that he was guilty and he was apologizing. But then the same guy you know, within that same week, was maintaining his absolute innocence and you get them on the phone and in the same conversation. He’ll tell you what he did and then he’ll tell you he did nothing. 
You got to dive into that as crazy as that seems.”

Reinaldo Marcus Green directed each and every episode of We Own This City and he told Decider that he wanted the end of the series to come “full circle” to the beginning. Green said, “The opening monologue knocked my socks off. It really did. When I opened the script, I was like, ‘This is amazing.’ And then of course I was like, ‘Jon Bernthal is going to read these words.'”

We Own This City star Josh Charles remembered shooting that final scene early on in the process. He said, “One of the fun things about working with Jon [Bernthal] is he kind of goes for it, you know, you just be there and he’s really game. He’ll keep pushing and pushing, and I love that about him. It’s fun.
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Jamie Hector agreed. “What is something to be said when you really enjoy watching a performance? So I had to kind of pinch myself sometimes because like Josh said, I was watching Jon and I was like, ‘My man, woo!'”

Green said, “By coming full circle in that moment, I think it’s a moment of reflection for our character who we’ve now spent six episodes with, have grown to love, in our own weird way, or hate, or for whatever reason. We now are reflecting with him and all the things that he might be feeling: guilt, pain, denial and how that impacts all of us. It’s our own consciousness being portrayed on screen, like, ‘Oh, am I doing enough? Am I a quiet citizen here? Like, who am I in this? Am I complicit in this behavior?'”

“I think that there’s a real question of culpability,” Bernthal said of both that moment and the series as a whole. “I got to be really close with a lot of these guys who served on these task forces. 
These plain clothes units, aggressive police units. And, you know, a lot of them talked about the fact that one of the big problems with the police — and this is coming from the police — is that they just they’ve been taught to not admit it when they’re wrong.”

“The culture of policing and the systems that are set down, they create this kind of behavior. There’s no question about it. So there is some place that you can always throw blame to, but also you make a personal decision in what you do every day. And I think it really adds to the complication and the nuance of this story.
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Bernthal added that the structure of We Own This City‘s ending was a “mixture of shame and glory.” Wayne Jenkins can brag he’s the best cop of all time he knows he will be thought of as the most corrupt cop of all time. The fine line between those two realities is, for Bernthal, what We Own This City was all about.