Cop in the Hood

And she didn't even snitch!

2008-07-18T13:10:00.004-04:00

The LAPD was interrogated a murder suspect. A detective told the suspect that a girl he knew had ratting him out. Said she had picked him up out of lineup and signed her name. They even showed him the lineup with her initials. But it was a trick. A ruse. She had nothing to do with it.

What happened next was no joke. The suspect made a call from a jail pay phone ordering her killed. She was.

His call is recorded on tape. But police didn't listen to the tape till after the murder.

The detective has been reassigned.

WNYC Radio Gig

2008-07-17T21:40:00.003-04:00

I'll be on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show this coming Tuesday, July 22, at 12 noon (Eastern Time). The show is rebroadcast at 3am the following morning. You can listen live through their website or stream through your iTunes (look under: radio, public, then WNYC AM or FM).

I hate to admit it, but Mr. Lopate is very often the first voice I hear after I wake up.

Officials Struggle With Rise in Knife Crimes Among Britain’s Youths

2008-07-17T21:02:00.002-04:00

Knife crimes? If only we could be so lucky! The story is here.

For all the panic about rising knife violence in London, let's keep in mind that London has 7.3 million people and about 160 murders a year. That's fewer than New York City. Hell, it's even fewer than Baltimore (population: 650,000)! And it's not that London has a low crime rate. It just has less lethal violence.

London does have strong and effective gun control. Sure, you can kill somebody with a knife, but it's a lot messier.

Off-Duty Detective Who Shot a Gunman After Drinking Is Restored to Full Duty

2008-07-17T11:27:00.003-04:00

I should hope so!

The right thing was done. In the end. Too bad it was even an issue to begin with. This cop did everything right. The important thing isn't if off-duty cops are drinking, it's if they do the right thing.

It's one thing if Mothers Against Drug Driving imposes it's Prohibitionist and puritanical views on our driving laws. But hands off the NYPD!

Snitchin'

2008-07-17T11:23:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has an article about covering up a "Stop Snitchin'" mural.

The shame is that we need snitches... I mean witnesses... willing to testify. Too bad it's dangerous.

If we didn't use snitches so much in locking up drug criminals, I bet snitching wouldn't have such a bad name.

Wall Street Journal Book Review

2008-07-14T12:27:00.010-04:00

The Wall Street Journal reviewed Cop in the Hood today. In the small world of books like this, that's big. And it's a good review! My only complaint is his assertion in the last paragraph that I lacked the impulse to run toward gunfire. I often did. My heart was big enough to be a good researcher and a good police officer.

A Close Look at Mean Streets
July 14, 2008; Page A15

Cop in the Hood
By Peter Moskos
(Princeton, 245 pages, $24.95)

Never Mind "The Wire."
Here is the real thing.

By DANIEL HORAN

High on the list of things that police officers loathe -- and the list is a long one -- is the sight of an egghead doctoral candidate approaching the precinct house in the hope of finding a research subject. Among cops it is generally assumed that, no matter how much time an academic researcher may spend on ride-alongs in the field, and no matter how well intentioned he may be, he will remain an outsider, studying a culture that is all but impenetrably foreign to him. Which makes Peter Moskos's "Cop in the Hood" all the more remarkable and all the more welcome.

Mr. Moskos is an assistant professor of law and political science at New York's John Jay College. In 1999, as a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, he was granted permission to join a police academy class in Baltimore for the purpose of studying police training. On his second day, though, he was pulled from the class and told that he could not continue. A shift in Baltimore's political winds had swept out the police commissioner who had approved the project, and the interim commissioner was unreceptive to the idea.

But Mr. Moskos was offered an interesting alternative: He could continue his research, he was told, if he completed the city's hiring process and became an actual police officer. He accepted the challenge, passing a battery of tests that included the first mile-and-a-half run of his life. In "Cop in the Hood" he acknowledges that having been on the payroll of the organization he was studying presented, in strict academic terms, a potential conflict of interest, but he writes that "a meager paycheck can go a long way to advance the noble pursuit of knowledge, especially since none of my grant applications had been accepted."

Mr. Moskos completed his training and was assigned to the midnight shift in Baltimore's Eastern District. He spent 14 months as a patrol officer before returning to Harvard, but in that short time he saw more mayhem than most police officers see in 14 years. The murder rate in Baltimore is six times that of New York City, and the Eastern District is the city's most violent.

Mr. Moskos discovered that the police academy, with its emphasis on quasimilitary formalities and tedious routines, did little to prepare him for the reality of Baltimore's meanest streets. Like most rookie police officers, who tend to be law-abiding members of the middle class, he had had little exposure to life in what he unabashedly calls the "ghetto," where he was routinely called into people's homes "because the residents have, at some level, lost control."

He describes in unsparing detail the conditions he found to be all too common -- homes "without heat or electricity, rooms lacking furniture filled with filth and dirty clothes, roaches and mice running rampant, jars and buckets of urine stacked in corners, and multiple children sleeping on bare and dirty mattresses." Entering a "normal" home, one that was "well furnished and clean," he writes, was "so rare that it would be mentioned to fellow officers."

A lot of his time on patrol was spent "clearing the corners" of young drug dealers. The task was usually accomplished through a simple assertion of dominance, in which the cops stopped their car and stared the dealers down. The dealers who got the message and moved on were allowed to do so, while those who defiantly returned the stare were detained and often arrested for loitering. As Mr. Moskos discovered, much of police work simply involves the cops exerting their authority, either formally or informally, over those they believe to be lawbreakers. "Every drug call to which police respond," he writes, "indeed all police dealings with social or criminal misbehavior, will result in the suspect's arrest, departure, or deference."

In "Cop in the Hood," Mr. Moskos manages to capture a world that most people know only through the distorting prism of television and film, where police officers are usually portrayed as quixotically heroic or contemptibly corrupt. "Incidents [of corruption] do happen," Mr. Moskos says, "but the police culture is not corrupt."

For all the book's detail, Mr. Moskos reserves his most passionate writing for a call to abandon the war on drugs. He claims that the drug war -- with its violent turf battles and revolving-door cycles of arrest -- has caused more social devastation than drugs themselves. This is an opinion much in vogue today, one no doubt shared by most of Mr. Moskos's colleagues in academia but not by most police officers.

One must admire Mr. Moskos for his willingness to walk in a police officer's shoes for 20 months. But it is important to remember, while reading "Cop in the Hood," that though he wore the badge and carried the gun, in his heart he was still a researcher foremost, not a police officer. He lacked the attribute that marks out the genuine cop -- that rare and inexplicable impulse to run toward gunfire when other sane people are running away. It is an attribute that may be described and analyzed at Harvard, but it is not often found there.

_____________

Mr. Horan is a police officer in California.

Bad Person. Bad Judge.

2008-07-14T11:52:00.002-04:00

Too many people refuse to believe that there are some truly bad people out there. Some people are just bad. Police know this. Judges don't.

Is it unfair to throw someone in prison for a long time for a technical violation of parole? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the person.

Just because you can't convict a person doesn't mean he's not guilty. That's when using probation and parole violations become so important.

There's an attempt in Baltimore to crack down on 960 of the most violent people in Baltimore. This is exactly the kind of plan that has worked with great success in other cities to dramatically reduce violence (google: "Boston Miracle). There's a story in today's Baltimore Sun about a bad man, Jerrod Rowlett.

On one hand (the wrong hand) you could see this man as a victim now being locked up for a crime he wasn't convicted of. On the other hand, the correct hand, this is a bad and violent man who can't be convicted because his victims are too terrified to testify about his violent and drug-dealing ways. It's bad that Rowlett shot anybody. But his last shooting is a preventable shame that should (but probably doesn't) rest on the conscience of Judge Stewart's.

Jerrod Rowlett... racked up a dozen criminal charges at a young age and earned such a street reputation that Bealefeld [the police commissioner] knows him by name.
...
Rowlett's first arrest came when he was 16 and accused of first-degree murder, but he was found not guilty. The next year he was convicted of carrying a handgun, but the five-year sentence was suspended. He was found guilty of assault in 2005 and got another five-year suspended sentence.

In April 2006 city police raided a drug corner and charged him with dealing heroin. He made bail, and the following January a witness said Rowlett shot another man
...
Rowlett pleaded guilty in both cases.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Lynn Stewart signed off on a plea deal that suspended the 15-year prison term, allowing him to walk away with only the time he had served while waiting for the deal, and five years' probation. This earned him a place on the state's year-old worst-offenders list.

The judge in Rowlett's case, who had agreed to the plea agreement, had stern words at his August hearing. "The court will work with you," Stewart told him. "But make no doubt about it, sir. If you violate the probation, you're going to be gone for a long time. Do you understand?"

Looking down, he mumbled "Yes."

In April, police arrested Rowlett again on a gun charge, and probation agents jumped at the chance to send him to prison. Prosecutors dropped the charges when the victim, a family member, recanted the story, but the probation agents still sought a violation.

Since Rowlett was in the target program, a state probation agent asked Stewart to imprison him anyway by issuing a "no bail" warrant, saying Rowlett failed to tell his agent about the arrest. Stewart declined to issue the warrant on May 7.

Twenty days later, Rowlett became a suspect in a midday shooting in Northeast Baltimore. He's now charged with attempted first-degree murder for the fourth time in his life, and he is off the streets - being held without bail until his trial.

May he stay off the streets. This is one guy I'm willing to pay for to keep locked up and far away from me.

Carmelo Anthony in the New York Times

2008-07-14T09:41:00.002-04:00

I'm not a fan of basketball. But I am a little interested in Carmelo Anthony. The only reason I know him is that he (unwittingly) appeared in the Stop Fucking Snitching DVD that got him and the DVD a lot of press. Bad press for him. Any press was good for the home-produced DVD.

I felt sorry for the guy who was somehow blamed for the whole Stop Snitching philosophy simply for going back to his hometown of Baltimore and not freaking out when someone recorded him with a camcorder (he doesn't say much in the DVD other than a little against the last Olympic basketball coach).

Now he has an Olympic basketball diary in the New York Times. His writing ain't too deep. But still, he is in the Times. At least online.

Amsterdam Police Officer Killed

2008-07-12T12:40:00.006-04:00

Police Officer Gabriëlle Cevat was shot and killed on her way to work. Cevat saw a drunk driver, called the police station, and proceeded to stop the driver. She was wearing street clothes and displaying her police identification.

Her killer, a 49-year-old Aruban-born resident of Amsterdam with a criminal record, was arrested in the apartment of his ex-girlfriend, who wasn't home. Three teenagers who were home fled out a window of the apartment.

Cevat is just the 5th Amsterdam police officer to be killed since World War II.

New international drug use stats

2008-07-12T02:19:00.005-04:00

For years everybody has been citing the same good but somewhat dated stats on comparative drug use in the U.S. and other countries (I know because I did so in my book).

Well, while I was busy visiting family and friends in Amsterdam last week, a new study was released (in conjunction with the World Health Organization) that updates drug use stats in 17 countries. At first glance, it seems that nothing big has changed in the past 7 years. Here's the main table.

Guess what? Good news for all the red, white, and blue flag wavers! U.S.A.! We're number 1! We're number 1! In illegal drug use.

No country comes close to use in cocaine use. And only one country comes close in marijuana: New Zealand. For some reason, that's not a surprise to me.

Why the War on Drug Fails

2008-07-12T01:13:00.004-04:00

A friend and former student of mine, a police officer on Long Island, tells me:
"Right now heroin is cheaper then crack and cocaine. So it has become the drug of choice. From Jan 07 to Aug 07 there was 42 heroin overdose just in two precinct in Nassau county."

There are eight precincts in Nassau County and a total population of 1.3 million. Let's assume, because I don't know better, that the 2 precincts represent 1/4 of the population. That's an annual heroin overdose death rate of 22 per 100,000 people, about twice the national average.

If we really cared about saving lives, we could save these lives. But we clearly don't care because we persist in policies that cause deaths. If saving lives were our priority, we could follow the policies of countries with much lower overdose death rates.

First of all, education. We treat all illegal drugs as equally bad. Zero Tolerance. But all drugs aren't equally bad. Heroin is a horrible drug. Maybe the worst. Marijuana isn't really bad at all. Cocaine is somewhere in between. This is important. I would love to give teenagers weed if only they wouldn't try heroin. At least tell them the truth about weed so they'll believe it when you tell them to fear heroin.

Take the Netherlands. Yes, the Netherlands. The country that drug warriors love to laugh at and dismiss because they don't want to fight our war on drugs. In Amsterdam, you can walk into a tax-paying store and legally buy weed, hash, even magic mushrooms. The government gives out heroin to addicts (not most addicts, however). Prohibitionists say that "sends the wrong message."

Here's the message: in the Netherlands, drug usage rates and overdose rates are much lower than in the U.S. (and so is their incarceration rate, while we're at it).

Fewer people take drugs because they don't play the prohibitionist's drug game. Those that do take drugs don't die. The overdose rate in the Netherlands is 0.75 per 100,000.

Get this: in their entire country of over 16 million, there were 122 overdose deaths in a year. That's fewer than Baltimore City alone. Probably fewer than Nassau County, too.

We could save lives--tens of thousands of lives each year--if we really cared about saving lives. But we don't. We see overdoses as unfortunate. Hell, maybe not even that. Overdose deaths "send a good message," I've heard.

The war on drugs isn't about saving lives. It's about maintaining prohibition. Too bad prohibition kills.

Nevada ACLU opposes gun control

2008-07-11T12:43:00.003-04:00

I've always said the ACLU and NRA should team up. They're both defending constitutional rights. They're just defending deferent rights.

I'm proud to have sworn to defend the Constitutions of of the United States. And I can say in good faith that I did a better job than the President. (I also swore to defend the Constitution of the State of Maryland, but I'd be damned if I could tell you anything it says.)

Whether it's gun control or abortion rights--and I'm for both--people have to understand that just because you like something doesn't make it a Constitutional Right. I like abortion rights, but I'll be damned if I can find it in the Constitution. I don't like guns, but the 2nd Amendment certainly protects something.

In theory, neither the Supreme Court nor the ACLU is political. Of course they both are, but that's another story. Still, I'm happy when either takes a position that supports what they stand for, and not what they want politically.

The next time the Supreme Court rules for or against a law you like, take a step back and think about their interpretation of the Constitution and not just whether you like the law.

So kudos to the Nevada ACLU for defending an individual's Constitutional right to bear arms. Just because I'm against it, doesn't mean it's not a right worth defending. That's the whole point about rights. If we don't believe in the Constitution, then it's just a piece of paper.

Here's the story on the Nevada ACLU and gun control.

Officer kills 5th criminal

2008-07-11T11:10:00.001-04:00

I received an email with a link to this story. Supercop or super killer. You decide.

This is the U.S. on drugs

2008-07-06T09:02:00.002-04:00

An op-ed from the L.A. Times by David W. Fleming and fellow LEAP member James P. Gray.

Only cops and crooks have benefited from $2.5 trillion spent fighting trafficking.

July 5, 2008

The United States' so-called war on drugs brings to mind the old saying that if you find yourself trapped in a deep hole, stop digging. Yet, last week, the Senate approved an aid package to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, with a record $400 million going to Mexico and $65 million to Central America.

The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.

The first group are the drug lords in nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan and Mexico, as well as those in the United States. They are making billions of dollars every year -- tax free.

The second group are the street gangs that infest many of our cities and neighborhoods, whose main source of income is the sale of illegal drugs.

Third are those people in government who are paid well to fight the first two groups. Their powers and bureaucratic fiefdoms grow larger with each tax dollar spent to fund this massive program that has been proved not to work.

Fourth are the politicians who get elected and reelected by talking tough -- not smart, just tough -- about drugs and crime. But the tougher we get in prosecuting nonviolent drug crimes, the softer we get in the prosecution of everything else because of the limited resources to fund the criminal justice system.

The fifth group are people who make money from increased crime. They include those who build prisons and those who staff them. The prison guards union is one of the strongest lobbying groups in California today, and its ranks continue to grow.

And last are the terrorist groups worldwide that are principally financed by the sale of illegal drugs.

Who are the losers in this war? Literally everyone else, especially our children.

Today, there are more drugs on our streets at cheaper prices than ever before. There are more than 1.2 million people behind bars in the U.S., and a large percentage of them for nonviolent drug usage. Under our failed drug policy, it is easier for young people to obtain illegal drugs than a six-pack of beer. Why? Because the sellers of illegal drugs don't ask kids for IDs. As soon as we outlaw a substance, we abandon our ability to regulate and control the marketing of that substance.

After we came to our senses and repealed alcohol prohibition, homicides dropped by 60% and continued to decline until World War II. Today's murder rates would likely again plummet if we ended drug prohibition.

So what is the answer? Start by removing criminal penalties for marijuana, just as we did for alcohol. If we were to do this, according to state budget figures, California alone would save more than $1 billion annually, which we now spend in a futile effort to eradicate marijuana use and to jail nonviolent users. Is it any wonder that marijuana has become the largest cash crop in California?

We could generate billions of dollars by taxing the stuff, just as we do with tobacco and alcohol.

We should also reclassify most Schedule I drugs (drugs that the federal government alleges have no medicinal value, including marijuana and heroin) as Schedule II drugs (which require a prescription), with the government regulating their production, overseeing their potency, controlling their distribution and allowing licensed professionals (physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc.) to prescribe them. This course of action would acknowledge that medical issues, such as drug addiction, are best left under the supervision of medical doctors instead of police officers.

The mission of the criminal justice system should always be to protect us from one another and not from ourselves. That means that drug users who drive a motor vehicle or commit other crimes while under the influence of these drugs would continue to be held criminally responsible for their actions, with strict penalties. But that said, the system should not be used to protect us from ourselves.

Ending drug prohibition, taxing and regulating drugs and spending tax dollars to treat addiction and dependency are the approaches that many of the world's industrialized countries are taking. Those approaches are ones that work.
_____________________________

David W. Fleming, a lawyer, is the chairman of the Los Angeles County Business Federation and immediate past chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. James P. Gray is a judge of the Orange County Superior Court.

Tasers for self-defense

2008-07-02T09:21:00.002-04:00

Tasers for home use? Guns for police officers? It's not a bad idea.

Gun Control

2008-07-01T19:21:00.003-04:00

If you really hate guns and can't stand gun ownership (I hate guns but can understand gun ownership), then you should take some solace in the fact that guns are used in suicide more than homicide and accidents put together. About 55% of our 31,000 annual gun deaths are suicide.

2nd Amendment

2008-07-01T18:53:00.003-04:00

I'm of two minds when it comes to gun control and the 2nd Amendment. I'm not a fan of guns. I would love to live in a society that heavily restricted gun ownership. But I don't.

Say what you want about the 2nd Amendment... and I've always said--just to be provocative to my liberal friends--that if you see the constitution as so broad that it gives women the right to have an abortion, then certainly you can see the 2nd Amendment broadly enough to give a man the right to bear arms. Now the Supreme Court has had their say.

On one hand, it is a huge decision overturning decades of local gun control laws.

On the other hand, gun control fans, it won't matter. Really. Giving law abiding people the right to have a gun in their home isn't so bad. I had a gun.

I'm no fan of the N.R.A., but they do make one good point: we already have laws making guns illegal. If we don't or can't enforce our existing gun laws, it makes no sense to pass more laws making guns more illegal. Must gun control simply prevented non-criminals from having a gun. The problem is criminals with guns. What do we do about them?

One thing I learned as a cop is that there are a lot of illegal guns out there. More than you can imagine. That's a big problem. Gun prohibition isn't a battle worth fighting. Best to save the political capital for something else.

Study finds long benefit in psychedelic mushrooms

2008-07-01T18:22:00.004-04:00

Interesting story here.

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam the move to re-criminalize psychedelic mushrooms has been postponed another year. They're still sold legally in stores.

Some of my friends in Amsterdam (from where I write this) are E.R. nurses. They complain to me about the summer influx of drugged-out people to the hospitals. They're all tourists and mostly casualties of shrooms and spacecakes. They live. But they annoy the hell out of the nurses.

Health care in the Netherlands, by the way, is not free for tourists.

Man kills burglars

2008-07-01T18:12:00.006-04:00

A man in Texas killed two men who had burglarized his neighbor's property. A grand jury decided not to indict the killer.

In general, I don't have much sympathy who criminals who get killed in the act of committing a serious crime. But this case pushes the limit because the guy wasn't protecting his life or his property, he called 911 and the dispatcher told him to say inside, and the criminals weren't any threat to him. Best I can tell, the man went out and shot two guys (illegal immigrants) because they had robbed his neighbors.

If a cop had done it, he or she would certainly be indicted. I don't think this killing was right. I think it's murder. And yet, I don't want anybody to be convicted for shooting burglars. I can't quite explain this contradiction in my beliefs.

You can't make this stuff up!

2008-06-30T18:38:00.000-04:00

Missouri Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor

"Engaging as Well as Persuasive"

2008-06-30T18:00:00.003-04:00

So says Diane Scharper in the Baltimore Sun about my book, Cop in the Hood. Here's the whole review:

In his classic book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser claimed that people and places were the twin pillars on which all good nonfiction is built. These three books - all with a local connection - prove that point. Their subjects qualify them as textbooks. Yet they are written so engagingly that any one of them could be beach reading. The secret lies in the authors' attention to detail, story line, character and setting.

Cop in the Hood By Peter Moskos

When former President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, he outlawed barbiturates, amphetamines and LSD. He also perhaps inadvertently set the stage for today's system of jailing drug offenders, costing $22,000 per prisoner per year - a total of $8 billion annually - while propelling robbery and murder statistics to record heights. After nearly 40 years, it's time to admit that this costly war has failed, says Peter Moskos in his Baltimore-based book, Cop in the Hood.

An assistant professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at the City University of New York, Moskos came to Baltimore while a Harvard University graduate student to gather "valid data on job-related police behavior." It took him three years to turn that data into a Ph.D. dissertation and another three years to write this account.

A Chicago native, Moskos knew Baltimore primarily from the films of John Waters and Barry Levinson, whose depictions of the city differ significantly from the conditions Moskos found. Moskos was both dismayed and fascinated by Baltimore's Eastern District, which he calls "one of the worst ghettos in America" in terms of "violence, drugs, abandonment, and despair," much of it caused by drugs.

Chronicling his six months training in the police academy and the 14 months he patrolled Baltimore's east side, Moskos blends academic writing with techniques of creative nonfiction. Moskos packs his account with anecdotes, details, dialogue and off-the-cuff observations about everything from the Baltimore dialect to ghetto slang to the recipe for crack.

Ultimately, his story is engaging as well as persuasive. As Moskos aptly puts it, "If [after all these years] the war on drugs were winnable, it would already be won."

Does cheap gasoline cause crime?

2008-06-29T19:12:00.004-04:00

I wish gas were taxed more. Much more. Luckily, I'm not running for political office. I saw this figure in an article in today's New York Times. The point of the article is that gas in the U.S. is still pretty cheap compared to most countries. But when I look at the figure, I see what I think is an inverse correlation between the price of gas and crime. Leaving aside middle-eastern countries that produce oil, countries with cheap gas have higher crime rates and countries with expensive gas have less crime. I haven't actually looked at the crime rates for these countries (and if somebody has the time and desire, please do and let me know), because I don't think this correlation has any real meaning. But it's interesting.

While I'm pretty sure that higher gas taxes won't cut the homicide rate, there does seem to be a pretty strong correlation between expensive gas and safe streets. I'm writing this from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Gas here tops the chart at $10 a gallon. Yet the economy seems to be doing just fine and too many people still drive to work in SUVs.

What does the government do with all this tax money? Along with more police and safe streets, there's also health care, job security, paid vacations, public transportation, bike paths, and a secure system of dikes and levies that actually keeps the country from being flooded. Not bad for a few bucks a gallon.

"Couldn't put it down"

2008-06-29T12:50:00.002-04:00

I don't know who this guy is, but I like him because he likes my book. A lot. Certainly more than he likes O'Malley.

Officer Pete says (rule 1):

2008-06-28T09:01:00.001-04:00

Always keep your hands where I can see them.

[All the rules of "Officer Pete says" can be seen here. Got any to add? Please do so in a comment!]

Officer Pete says (rule 2):

2008-06-25T09:01:00.002-04:00

Please sit still when I ask you to.