Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing
Baltimore's Eastern District

Critical Acclaim:

"This riveting tale of policing begins honestly and continues with great sincerity and pathos. A sensitive and timely account of the daily trials of police work by someone who knows Baltimore's streets first-hand, Cop in the Hood challenges journalists, social scientists, and others who profess knowledge of the inner city to walk those streets before making bold declarations and righteous claims for policy and redress. A must read."
—Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

"Peter Moskos's [Cop in the Hood is] truly excellent. This is one of the two or three best conceptual analyses of 'cops and robbers' I have read. Mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else."
—Economist Tyler Cowen, George Mason University, cofounder of marginalrevolution.com

"Cop in the Hood is a powerful and truly unique document in the sociology of the criminal justice system. Using an original blend of racy personal observation, adroit cultural interpretation and hard-edged sociological analysis, Moskos examines police work in one of America’s worst ghettos. While showing us this tragedy close up from the police perspective, Moskos also sympathetically dissects the social context and cultural underpinnings of the drug users’ world. What emerges is a devastating critique of America’s failed war on drugs."
—Harvard University Sociologist Orlando Patterson

"Cop in the Hood is a thoughtful, highly entertaining record of a police officer’s year spent patrolling one of the country’s toughest urban districts.  For those who are interested in crime and how things work, and for readers seeking a reasoned look at the war on drugs and its implications, this is the handbook."
—George Pelecanos, author. Writer and producer of HBO's The Wire

"Peter Moskos, a sociologist by training, somewhat inadvertently became a police officer. Cop in the Hood is the fortuitous and fascinating result. It gives the reader the real dope from someone with the training and ability to put the street into the larger context. Highly recommended."
—Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University, cofounder of marginalrevolution.com

"Cop in the Hood is an extremely valuable study centered on patrolling a drug-infested Baltimore police district. Readers interested in drug policy, criminology, or policing cannot help but to learn a lot from this book. I know that I did, and I am grateful to the author. Many of his insights are eye-opening. His voice is unique and essential in debates concerning drug-policy reforms."
—Jim Leitzel, University of Chicago

"Much more genuinely eye-opening is Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood (to be published by Princeton University Press in May). Moskos, who is now an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, did the research for a PhD, which forms the basis for his book, simply by joining the Baltimore police for 'six months in the academy and 14 months on the street.' He admits to feelings of 'empathy' towards fellow officers who, like him, would put their lives on the line for 'those I didn't know and those I did know and didn't like.' And he confesses that he found the terrible East District ghetto 'exotic.' But despite his confessedly 'unscientific methods,' Moskos offers a compelling account of why a uniformed police patrol 'does little but temporarily disrupt public drug-dealing' — and hence why 'the war on drugs' is so hopelessly self-defeating."
—Times Higher Education

"Moskos blends narrative and analysis, adding an authoritative tone to this adrenaline-accelerating night ride that reveals the stark realities of law enforcement while illuminating little-known aspects of police procedures."
—Publishers Weekly

"Those prone to facile comparisons will liken this riveting book to The Wire, the acclaimed and popular cable-television series that inhabits the same mean streets. Those who take a longer view, however, will see this for what it is: an unsparing boys-in-blue procedural that succeeds on its own plentiful—and wonderfully sympathetic—merits. Moskos, now an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, deftly intermingles cops-and-robbers verisimilitude and progressive social science, yet keeps his reportage clear-eyed, his conclusions pathos-free. What results is a thoughtful, measured critique—of the failed drug war, its discontents, and the self-defeating criminal-justice system looming just behind."
—The Atlantic

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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—where he experienced the real-life poverty and violent crime firsthand. He provides an unforgettable window into this world that outsiders never see—the thriving drug corners, the nerve-rattling patrols, and the heartbreaking failure of 911.

Moskos reveals the truth about the drug war and why it is engineered to fail—a truth he learned on the midnight shift in Baltimore. He describes police-academy graduates fully unprepared for the realities of the street. He tells of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates poor black men on a mass scale—a self-defeating system that measures success by arrest quotas and fosters a street code at odds with the rest of society—and argues for drug legalization as the only realistic way to end drug violence and let cops once again protect and serve. Moskos 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. Cop in the Hood ventures deep behind the Thin Blue Line to disclose the inner workings of law enforcement in America’s inner cities. Those who read it will never view the badge the same way.
—Princeton University Press

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