WNYC Radio Gig

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.

Wall Street Journal Book Review

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.

"Engaging as Well as Persuasive"

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."

"Couldn't put it down"

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.

Ron Smith Show Interview

You can listen to my appearance on WBAL's Ron Smith show.

Ron Smith show

Today. Tuesday. 5pm Eastern Time. Baltimore's WBAL, AM 1090. Listen live.

Back on the Ron Smith show

It looks like I'll be back on WBAL's Ron Smith Show Tuesday, June 17, 5pm. AM 1090 in Baltimore. If you're not in Balto, you can stream the show online.

Much less scintillating that Whitey Bulger's right-hand man

So says Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) about me and my book in his Freakonomics blog in the New York Times. And for that, I can only thank God. But I'm pleased that Levitt liked my book.

Much less scintillating than a book by Whitey Bulger's right-hand man? I should hope so. I was just a poor beat cop in Baltimore. I never killed anybody. But my book, Cop in the Hood, isn't just a memoir, it has a point: end the war on drugs!

My book also helps explain why so many poor black American men are in prison. And it's not the reason you think it is, because it has nothing to do with being poor, black, young, or male. It has everything to do with police wanting overtime pay.

I wish Levitt had liked my book a bit more, because I respect him deeply. Still, he read my book. He liked my book. And he's happy he read my book. And you will be, too.

Save the date, Tuesday, May 13, 4:15pm

I'll be on WBAL's Ron Smith Show, Tuesday, May 13, at 4:15pm (EDT). You can listen to a live stream of the broadcast. I used to listen to WBAL a lot, because they used to broadcast the Orioles games. I particularly liked the local ads for crabcakes and the steamfitters and stevedores local. That's keeping it real.

Praise for Cop in the Hood

Doug LeMaine, an obviously smart man with excellent taste in books, posted this on his website. I couldn't have said it better myself:

Last week I picked up a book called Cop in the Hood by a grad student turned cop (turned academic) named Peter Moskos. He’s a law professor now [I'm not a law professor. But a lot of people think I am because "law" is in my department's name.], but he spent a year policing East Baltimore during his PhD work and wrote a part sociological analysis, part police procedural about his experience.

If The Wire had a literary analog, this would be it, not only because it takes place in East Baltimore, but because it presents a morally complex view of the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry with whom they interact (mostly poor people in desperate circumstances). It also adds academic underpinnings and a truly excellent set of footnotes that provide avenues to a variety of interesting sources, one of which led me to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles, a 1998 installment of the Cop Diary called “The Word on the Street” about the language of NYC cops. The author, the pseudonymous Marcus Laffey (actual name: Edward Conlon) recently wrote a memoir called Blue Blood, which is going on the list for sure.

I really appreciated his discussion of research methods because it puts in high relief some of the challenges that any researcher (e.g., one who is trying to understand how people use high-tech tools) interacts with their interview subjects. So much of it is very un-objective, and Moskos addresses his skeptics early on:

Some will criticize my unscientific methods. I have no real defense. Everything is true, but this book suffers from all the flaws inherent in ethnographic work … Being on the inside, I made little attempt to be objective. I did not pick, much less randomly pick, my research site or research subjects. I researched where I was assigned. To those I policed, I tried to be fair. But my empathy was to my fellow officers. Those nearest to me became my friends and research subjects. My theories emerged from experience, knowledge, and understanding. In academic jargon, my work could be called “front-and-backstage, multisited, participant-observation research using grounded theory rooted in symbolic interactionism from a dramaturgical perspective."

I have to add the next line: "But I can't even say it with a straight face. And if I wrote that way, very few would read it."

Interviewed in the Economist magazine

How nice to post something that will not mention... hmmm... shall we say, oh hell, let's not say anything at all.

There's a great short (16 minute) audio interview of me talking about crime and police and drug legalization.

I get a kick how the hook of the interview is the "liberal sociologist." By police standards, sure. But by liberal sociologist standards, I'm probably a fascist.

On Point

I was on National Public Radio's "On Point" today. You can listen to it here. It's a quick hour.

Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio

I'll be on Talk of the Nation today, after 2pm, Eastern Time.

Regarding Sean Bell

Clearly something wrong happened because an innocent man was killed," Peter Moskos, author of Cop in the Hood, and a professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told TIME. "But that's not what the system was testing. They were testing if there was reasonable doubt. I think the verdict is fair, but it doesn't address that this man was killed. The court system is no place to address these problems.

The whole article is here.

The Sean Bell verdict came out at 3pm, Amsterdam time. At 5pm, I got a call on my temporary Amsterdam cell phone from Time Magazine (thanks to John Jay's public relations and my quick thinking wife for getting my phone number to the reporter). It was an awkward interview, because 1) I don't like talking on cell phones. And 2) I'm standing in a bar in the Leidseplein with a gypsy band busking outside. I felt a very long way away from the Queens Courthouse. I was very worried about failing to get my thoughts together and being misquoted on such a sensitive topic.

Madison Gray captured my words and thoughts perfectly (and he mentioned my book).

A genuine "good guy"

Initially my presence was greeted with skepticism, especially from supervisors who believed, probably accurately, that nothing good could come from my writing. One lieutenant told me: “Moskos, I like you. But I don’t want anything to do with your book. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want my name in it. I don’t want any part of it.” Outside of this reference, he’s not.

That quote is from Cop in the Hood. That very lieutenant (if my memory is correct) sent me the following email:

Moskos,

I hope you are doing well.

You were always a genuine "good guy" and always listening and learning.

Can't wait to get the book.

It isn't like it used to be around here. You would probably only know a handful of people at the Eastern.

Good Luck, ............

Those are very kind words. Of course any two-bit grad student can listen and learn, it's the actual "doing" that makes you real police.

I received a follow-up email on 28 April:

Yes, I believe it was I the one who said don't put me or my name in your book. That's OK.

The small portion I read online looks great! It should be mandatory reading for all high school seniors to give them a taste of reality not seen on MTV's "real world".

So how's life as a professor? I hope things are going well for you. I bet some of your students can't believe some of the stories you can tell them about inner city life.

I think the experience you've had will be nothing but good for your career, and life in general.

You've had the chance to see things 95% of society doesn't know exist.

With any luck all of your students will become right wing conservatives!

From the Economist

This is from the Economist:

Thursday

I'M STANDING on a street lined with boarded-up shops—a popular haven for drug-dealers. A police officer is frisking a suspect whose trousers are nearly around his knees. The policeman didn't pull them down; that's how the suspect wears them. A bit impractical, perhaps, if his line of work requires him to run away from policemen.

But he insists that he is no longer in that line of work. He was caught once, but is now going straight. He has a legitimate reason for hanging around a nearly deserted street, after dark, in the pouring rain, for several hours. He is waiting for someone, he says.
AFP Follow the trousers

The police officer's colossal partner, whose sense of humour is as robust as his shoulders, prays aloud: “Oh Lord, I pray that a meteorite hits this [drug bazaar].” (He adds a P.S. to the effect that God should be careful not to hurt anyone.)

The temporal authorities in Baltimore take a more pragmatic approach to fighting crime. Like every other large city, they have copied elements of New York's system for mapping crime statistics, which allows police departments to send officers where they are most needed.

Baltimore has also put more officers on foot patrol, so that they are closer to the people they are supposed to protect. It has locked up many of the most violent offenders. And it has encouraged local volunteers to mediate between young hot-heads. Such volunteers know when a fight is about to erupt over, for example, a stolen girlfriend. All this is quite new, but the mayor, Sheila Dixon, thinks it is working. The murder rate for the first three months of this year was sharply lower than last year.

But still, the drug trade is unlikely to be peaceful so long as it is illegal. Crack pushers cannot ask the courts to settle their disputes. The only way to stop them shooting each other is to legalise drugs, reckons Peter Moskos, a sociologist who spent a year as a policeman in Baltimore's eastern district and wrote a book about it.

That is not going to happen, alas. And even if it did, it would hardly be a panacea. Anyone with a proper job leaves the ghetto. The young men left behind develop traits that render them unemployable. For example, says Mr Moskos, they react violently to trivial slights. This is a useful quality in a drug-dealer, but less so in most other trades.

I'm lowbrow and brilliant!

That's the word from New York Magazine's "Approval Matrix." I'll take it!

Fan mail

A friend and former student of mine (and mid-to-high-ranking officer in the NYPD) wrote me this:

I picked up your book at Barnes and Noble on W. 18th Street last Wednesday. Congratulations! Just started reading and it is enjoyable already. You’re the best author I know (and only author I know, we cops are not known to hang in literary circles).
I know you put a lot of hard work and sacrifice into this book. Thanks again for being my professor (Received MA degree in Feb.), friend and now distinguished author. Wish you continued success.

Talk to you soon,
[signed]

First Amazon reader review

A round of applause for Generic Guy. I'm glad you liked my book. Thank you.

In the Economist

I'm quoted prominently in an excellent article about Baltimore in the current Economist. But it's a real shame he didn't plug my book (Cop in the Hood). Or my school (John Jay College of Criminal Justice). But it is still a very good article.

A big problem for the police (and more so for respectable ghetto residents) is the unfortunate truth that for many young men, gangster culture is alluring. Apart from the low pay and the high risk of getting murdered, drug-dealing is not a bad job, says Peter Moskos, a sociologist who spent a year as a policeman in Baltimore's eastern district. You hang out with your friends. People “respect” (ie, fear) you. You project glamour. You get laid.

You also become otherwise unemployable, says Mr Moskos. To survive on the street, you learn to react violently and pre-emptively to the slightest challenge. This is a useful trait for a drug-dealer, but, oddly, managers at Starbucks do not value it.

...

Civil libertarians argue that America punishes non-violent drug offenders far too harshly. Mr Moskos reckons that, at least in Baltimore, the people jailed for drug possession are usually violent dealers whose more serious crimes cannot be proven or whose plea bargains have been accepted by an over-burdened judicial system. He thinks drugs should be legalised, though, because their prohibition fuels a criminal economy where disputes are settled violently.