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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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.