Cop in the Hood:
My Year Policing Baltimore's
Eastern District
Princeton University Press. 2008.
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.... Moskos reveals the truth about the drug war and why it is engineered to fail.... 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.... 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.
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Publications and Interviews
Professor Peter C. Moskos
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Department of Law and Police Science
pmoskos@jjay.cuny.edu
Books:
Cop in the Hood. Princeton University Press. 2008.
Articles:
The Better Part of Valor: Court-Overtime Pay as the Main Determinant for Discretionary Police Arrests.
Law Enforcement Executive Forum. Vol. 8(4), 2008.
911 and the Failure of Police Rapid Response
Law Enforcement Executive Forum. Vol. 7(4), 2007.
“Two Shades of Blue: Racial Distinctions Within a Common Police Identity.” Writings at the Intersection of Crime and Justice. Forthcoming.
“Afro-Anglo: America’s Core Culture: A Consolidation of Peoples in the
United States.” National Journal of Sociology. Vol. 9(2), 1995.
Op-eds:
Driving While Black (New York Times).
Balancing Security and Liberty (Washington Post).
Victims of the War on Drugs (Washington Post).
Old-School Cop in a New-School World (Washington Post).
Feet on the Street (New York Post).
Take the Violence Out of the Drug Trade (Baltimore Sun).
Buckle-Up or the Lock-Up (Baltimore Sun).
Book Reviews:
Norm Stamper's Breaking Rank
Bernard Harcourt's Against Prediction
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| Articles |
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The Better Part of Valor:
Court-Overtime Pay as the Main Determinant for Discretionary Police Arrests
Law Enforcement Executive Forum. Vol. 8(4). May 2008.
(will be posted after publication)
Discretionary arrests are more influenced by officer-based variables than any suspect-based variable. The discretionary will—even whim—of individual police officers, the desire to make an arrest, is the best predictor of arrest numbers. Desire for court overtime pay is the single more important factor affecting the quantity of discretionary arrests. Age and morale are also significant causal variables. |
Two Shades of Blue
Racial Distinctions Within a Police Identity

In Delores Jones-Brown (ed.).
Writings at
the Intersection of Crime and Justice. Forthcoming.
Black and white police officers have different attitudes towards
the role of police in society, police department politics, and the
minority community. A common ground of police identity is
found in conservative social beliefs and opposition to “ghetto”
culture. But attitudinal similarities do not negate differences
between the races. Black and white police do not blend into the
same shade of blue. |
911 and the Failure of
Police Rapid Response
Law Enforcement Executive Forum. 2007. vol. 7(4)

No police officer is ever promoted to beat cop. Foot patrol is most often a form of punishment. While the public generally favors increased foot patrol, the opposition
to foot patrol in the police organization is strong. Recognizing the failures and limitations of the status quo is the first step to
better patrol: 911 calls dominate police far more than rapid response impacts
crime.

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Afro-Anglo: America’s Core Culture: A Consolidation of Peoples in the
United States.
National Journal of Sociology. 1995. vol. 9(2)

There exists a Core Culture in American which is shared by all people inasmuch as they are American. This Core Culture is a consolidation of Anglo-American and Afro-American culture. While many authors view the black experience as distinct and separate from the core American experience, this paper argues that American Core Culture is uniquely defined by its Afro-Anglo nature—a blend of both the Afro and the Anglo culture, history, and experience. That Afro-Anglo culture has not been recognized as America’s Core Culture is due both the Eurocentrism of the dominant paradigm of American culture, and the Afrocentrist competing paradigm of a separate black American culture. Afro-Anglo Core Culture recognized the oneness of whites and blacks together as part of the American experience. |
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| Op-eds |
Read the Cop in the Hood blog |
Driving While Black
New York Times, July 30, 2006

Simply knowing the race of stopped drivers is virtually
meaningless; the data will neither placate critics nor reflect
well on what is generally a good police department.
The police officer in me is suspicious of any effort to
quantify a job that is — or at least should be — qualitative.
But the professor in me loves police data on race.
When I was a police officer in Baltimore, I was very
suspicious of whites driving slowly around drug corners in
the neighborhood at 3 a.m. Some might say I profiled white
people. I call it good policing.
Race is a factor in America and a factor in effective
policing. Racism should never be. |
Feet on the Street
New York Post, June 23, 2003

Why does it take six calls and 90 minutes for police to “handle” a call for drinking and disorderly people on a slow
Sunday morning? Because police are out of touch with the
areas they are meant to serve. There’s no cops walking the
beat.
The difference between a group of people quietly hanging
out and the same group of people being disorderly or even
threatening is too subtle for a police officer to determine if
isolated in a squad car. Yet any pedestrian or foot officer
can immediately tell when something is amiss. |
Balancing Security and Liberty
The Washington Post, August 2, 2004

The only way to prevent creeping use of implied consent is to
limit the doctrine of plain view. Before searching a person,
the government must choose either plain view or implied
consent.
If the government must search without probable cause, let it
search, but only for illegal weapons or bombs. If security
outweighs the Fourth Amendment, the scope of such
searches must be limited to objects representing a clear and
present danger to public safety. Any unrelated suspicious or
illegal objects found must be ignored. |
Old-School Cops in a New-School World
The Washington Post, August 05, 2003

One school of thought -- call it old school -- believes in the
moral righteousness of hitting back. Phrases like “he got what
he deserved” and “you reap what you sow” come to mind. If
someone disrespects you and grabs your private parts? The
old school says legal niceties be damned.
New-school police believe in cuffing suspects and writing
solid reports.
Though we demand new school behavior from our police,
most police officers are firmly old school. Old-school police
believe that the disrespectful deserve a “good thumping.” It’s
about respect. |
Take the Violence Out of the Drug Trade
Baltimore Sun, August 3, 2004.

The only way to disarm the drug culture is to take the profit
out of street-level drug-dealing. Drug legalization and
regulation are the answer. Why leave the profits to those
who perpetuate violent culture?
Legalizing drugs would not be a silver bullet. But drug
prohibition must be recognized as a good intention gone
terribly wrong. The war on drugs destroys neighborhoods,
enriches drug dealers and promotes a culture ruining the
lives of our cities’ youths. Drug prohibition is a failure. It’s
time to try something else. |
Buckle-Up or the Lock-Up
The Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2001

Allowing police to jail people for non-jailable offenses is
absurd as it helps neither the public nor the police.
As for the police thanking the Supreme Court for our new
power, not from this cop. |
Victims of the War on Drugs
The Washington Post, July 09, 2003

If the war on drugs were winnable, we would already have
won it. Drug prohibition criminalizes large segments of the
population, even the majority in some areas.
Those at the receiving end of our drug policy know it simply
doesn’t work. People will riot as long as police keep locking
them up without anything getting better.
Separate the problems of drug use from the violence of the
drug trade. Acknowledge that drugs are bad, but don’t
frame drug policy as a moral war against evil. |
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| Book Reviews |
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Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of Policing
by Norm Stamper
Law Enforcement News, September, 2005

Pity poor Norm Stamper. He would have liked nothing more
than to write a book extolling the virtues of community policing
and a greater police focus on domestic violence. A hard-working liberal police officer for 33 years, he rose from San
Diego beat cop to chief of the Seattle Police Department.
Then came the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle. Massive
protests and riots turned the city into chaos. Chief Stamper
later resigned, admitting that he and his police were woefully
unprepared for the scale of protests. Stamper’s name is now
cursed by both ends of the political spectrum, albeit for
different and often diametrically opposed reasons. |
Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age
by Bernard Harcourt
American Journal of Sociology. 2008. Vol. 113(5).

Under the medieval system of tything, individuals could be held responsible for the misdeeds of others in their collective group. In the movie Minority Report, set in the near future, criminals are incarcerated before they commit their crimes. Our present system of justice, according to Bernard E. Harcourt’s Against Prediction, combines the worst of both worlds. “The quest for prediction,” Harcourt writes, “has distorted our conception of just policing by emphasizing efficiency over crime minimization. Profiling has become second nature because of our natural tendency to favor economic efficiency.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
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