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Cop in the Hood


Winner of the 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Sociology

Buy Cop in the Hood from Amazon.com

Never mind "The Wire." Here is the real thing. --The Wall Street Journal

Cop in the Hood is an explosive insider’s story of what it is really like to be a police officer on the front lines of the war on drugs. Harvard-trained sociologist Peter Moskos became a cop in Baltimore’s roughest neighborhood — the Eastern District, also the location for the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire. He provides an unforgettable window into this world that outsiders never see. Those who read it will never view the badge the same way.

Moskos argues for drug legalization as the only realistic way to end drug violence and let cops once again protect and serve. Cop in the Hood shows how officers in the ghetto are less concerned with those policed than with self-preservation and maximizing overtime pay--yet how any one of them would give their life for a fellow officer. Moskos ventures deep behind the Thin Blue Line to disclose the inner workings of law enforcement in America's inner cities.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Holiday (Criminal) Spirit

The Christmas crime season is the US begins. This story from the NY Daily News. [November 30 Update] And the Chicago Sun Times. Street crime really does up before Christmas. Keep that in mind.

I'm in a pub in York, UK, right now. Leeds, where I'm staying, and where David Simon said he might have set The Wire if he set it in the UK, has maybe 3 or 4 homicides a year (or so I was told). Population 440,000. Baltimore, population 630,000 has more than 200.

In answer to one burning question here in the UK: Are parts of the cities becoming "like The Wire"?

No.

Baltimore (and most American cities) have more killings than the entire United Kingdom. Amazing how they manage to fend off all the anti-social drunks here without firearms. Somehow they manage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Cambria Heights neighborhood in Queens where the thieves shot the guy and left the TV behind actually seems like a fairly nice neighborhood.

Do these type of incidents often take place there?

PCM said...

I don't know much about Cambria Heights at all. But as far as I know, it does not have a particularly good reputation.