The Slow Hustle

I enjoyed the filming and story of this mystery. But I didn't care for the racist narrative in it.. but all and all it was a decent documentary. Prayers to the family.

Detective Suiter was a corrupt/dirty cop.

He knew he was headed to prison and wanted his wife (who I believe,knew about his criminal behavior) to have financial stability, instead of visiting him in prison. He staged his suic!de to look like a murder.

Why would his criminal partners want him dead? He refused to talk to investigators.

Don't you think Detective Gando would be the target ? He's the one who agreed to testify against EVERYONE.

Detective Gando's testimony was like a nuclear blast against the entire department, his testimony was also broadcast to the world in real time. There was no hiding or covering up his testimony. Wouldn't he be the ideal target?

It's shameful that Detective Suiters wife got $900,000 from the police department. I guess that's exactly what Suiter wanted.

This was a good documentary.

Good directing and visuals.

The into song was beautiful and haunting.

Well worth the watch!

This will go down as one of the most blatantly obvious internally corrupt police reports ever; from any police department in America. What a disgusting city (I thought the brutality and corruption was bad in New York) and the arrogant scumbags, like Officer Hersl (who should have gotten more than 18 years jail time), were openly defiant about it in bodycam evidence of their excessive use of force. A very well put together documentary film that also did an excellent job of showing that its not just white cops who are racist and corrupt...it presented/showed a whole bundle of lowlife black cops also (Asian and Hispanic ar no better either)!

The people of Baltimore need to band together and take these arrogant pricks down using the power of citizens arrests, cop watch video evidence and the courts etc.

Its about time calling police 'Pigs' was stopped. Why? Because pigs are actually very clean animals (when not laying around in the mud) and the large majority of cops - anywhere in the world- are far too dirty!

Most documentaries follow the the literary formula established by Gay Tálese in print journalism. They set forth a series of facts molded into the kind of story familiar to all of us from fiction. The camera follows a character on a quest for information through a series of events and ends with some kind of emotional pay off.

In this story, the widow of Baltimore police officer Sean Suiter tries to find out who killed her husband. The film begins as Suiter's partner calls 911 to report that he has been shot in the head, and the viewer watches through a body cam as a tape of his partner's panicked voice plays in the background.

What follows is a funeral with honors where Baltimore's finest honors one of its own. He is praised by cops and politicians.

And then we get to the real story. It's likely that Suiter was not only murdered by another cop, but that, he will never have justice. His wife knows it, the filmmaker knows it and, by the end of the movie, so does the audience.

As it turns out, for ever Serpico who becomes a hero at fighting corruption, there are countless Sean Suiters. And the corruption still wins.

Actress and director Sonja Sohn does an excellent job of showing how a high profile murder can go unsolved in a city like Baltimore. She doesn't care about where the viewer wants the story to go, or even what the viewer thinks. She tells the story, shows the human toll, and reminds us that corruption is bottomless.

At times, it's a tough watch, but imagine how tough it is for Sean Suitor's family.

As "The Slow Hustle" (2021 release; 88 min.) opens, it's "November 15, 2017" and we hear a frantic 911 call about a Baltimore police officer having been shot, and we then get the body cam footage as cops arrive on the scene. African-American police officer Sean Suiter is pronounced dead soon thereafter. Who did this? How is this going to be investigated? At this point we are less than 10 min into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from Baltimore actress turned director turned activist Sonja Sohn. Now 4 years since the death of Sean Suiter, she reassesses what happened in 2017 and in the years running up to those events. It ain't a pretty picture. The Baltimore Police Department is reeling from the 2015 Freddie Gray murder and social unrest, and also from massive corruption, resulting in 8 cops being indicted in early 2017. And what then about Sean Suiter's death? Multiple theories are advanced, which Sohn examines carefully, including by letting talking heads like a seasoned Baltimore Sun reporter and local TV reports give their independent perspective (I don't want to spoil and hence won't say any more on this). But the overall sense and picture is of a large police department being engulfed by corruption and dirty cops, with little to no regard for the population that it is supposed to serve. For shame.

"The Slow Hustle" premiered on HBO a few days ago, and is now available on HBO On Demand, HBO Max (where I caught it) and eventually on DVD/Blu-ray. If you are interested in the role of a large police department within its own community, while also looking at the mysterious death of one of their own, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.