'The Slow Hustle' Is A Complex, Journalistic Dive Into Policing In Baltimore [Review]

Long after her breakout role as Kima Greggs in HBO’s groundbreaking “The Wire,” Sonja Sohn has often returned to Baltimore as both a site of political activism and narrative storytelling. Her second documentary feature as director, “The Slow Hustle,” premiering on HBO, trains its lens on the death of Baltimore police officer Sean Suiter to fascinating results.

Killed in 2017, on the eve of testifying in a federal probe about police corruption within the city, his death was initially ruled a homicide. However, as Sohn shows with striking clarity, Suiter’s death, and the subsequent accusations of malfeasance against both Suiter and other officers is indicative of a dysfunctional and corrupt BPD that cannot self-regulate. Foregrounding Suiter’s family, “The Slow Hustle” is a dense, complex, and ultimately captivating look at how Sean Suiter’s death forced BPD to confront their own corrupt legacy.

Much like her first feature, “Baltimore Rising,” which tracked the protests and riots that emerged in the wake of the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray, “The Slow Hustle” uses Suiter’s death as an entry point to a larger investigation into police corruption. Appropriately, Suiter is a complicated figure — a cop who was both committed to his job and well-liked by those on the streets he patrolled but, also, perhaps corrupt and part of a group that planted evidence on innocents. By interviewing Suiter’s friends and family, in addition to Baltimore Sun journalists and activists, Sohn’s film embraces Suiter’s own contradictions. When the police finally finish their investigation, ultimately ruling his death a suicide, it’s not precisely a cathartic moment. This is mainly because no one trusts the BPD to investigate themselves, and the quickness in which they push aside questions of corruption is staggering. 

Sohn is ultimately less interested in answering questions about the causes of Suiter’s death — perhaps because the investigation was so botched, we’ll never know — than she is with how the police both lionized, and finally vilified him. His death instantly became a PR moment in which BPD could rally behind a fallen officer before news of his impending testimony created a backlash, connecting his death to the myriad accounts of corruption that the BPD hoped to avoid.

This whiplash is most felt by Suiter’s wife and family, whom Sohn foregrounds, as they repeatedly push back against any theories of corruption or suicide before the film jumps to journalists and officers who covered the case. Yet, “The Slow Hustle” continues to zoom out, allowing two critical journalists — D. Watkins, Editor at Large for Salon, and Justin Fenton, a Baltimore Sun reporter and author of “We Own This City: A Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption” — to shed light on the institutionalization of deceit and corruption in Baltimore writ-large. As Sohn pulls back to showcase BPD, one realizes that Suiter’s death exposes fault lines in the police force as those who push for any type of reform are disparaged.

“The Slow Hustle” is never an easy watch, beginning with the harrowing body-cam footage in the aftermath of Suiter’s death, but it’s also a film that wisely resists the simple answers. Instead, Sohn’s film mirrors the journalists she interviews, prioritizing complex questions about the nature of policing within urban spaces and positing that sometimes institutions may be beyond repair.   

In the end, Sean Suiter was a complex figure whom we’ll probably never get the full picture of. Was his death a pre-mediated hit by cops who knew he would testify? Retaliation for his own corrupt actions? Suicide as investigators were closing in on him? “The Slow Hustle” doesn’t reach for the type of catharsis that other films might, often resisting hypothesis and instead, treating Suiter’s life and death as a metonym for a system that obfuscates as much as possible. [A-]