Most of the time.
The City Paper is starting to look into homicides to see what actually happens in the Hall of Justice. Sometimes somebody gets put away. Most of the times, not.
I was turned onto this by the unfortunately fascinating Baltimore Crime Blog.
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.
A 10AM robbery of an armored truck pulled up at Lexington Market is bold, to say the least. Here’s the Sun’s account. Makes me think of the line from the Godfather, at least as I remember it: “Forget the gun, grab the crabcake!”
Always have your driver’s license on you when you drive. If not, please obey all the traffic laws.
I gave a talk on my book today at John Jay College. After the talk a man came up to me asking about my use of “cop.” He said when he was a kid, it was considered a bad word. Police officer is the proper term.
A couple of cops and students present discussed the issue. I don’t consider “cop” a bad word. Maybe it is a generational thing. And also, as one cop said, “it’s OK for cops to use the word.”
On the street, if somebody addressed me in the second person as “cop,” I wouldn’t have taken kindly to it. Officer was my title and it is, to some extent, a title of respect. But if you say, “I called 911 earlier and this cop came and said…”, that wouldn’t bother me at all.
I think cop is perfectly OK as a descriptive and when used in the third-person. But no, you shouldn’t address a cop as “cop.”
Philadelphia cops pulled three men out of a car and beat the crap out of them. For about 30 seconds. I find it inexcusable. I’m sure these guys who were beat are not good people. And no, I don’t know the whole story. But I can’t imagine anyscenario where it’s these beatings are justified.
What were they thinking? They were pumped on adrenaline. There was a shooting. A cop had been killed two days earlier. They surely felt these guys “deserved” a thumping. But that doesn’t make it right. Just because you want to beat somebody–just because perhaps they even deserve a good beating–doesn’t make you should. Some of these cops might have been very good police. And now their careers are over.
Even worse, the guys who were beat will get big bucks from the city, thanks to the stupid actions of a dozen cops.
If you have a link to my book on Amazon.com, take note:
Because of the coming re-release of my book, the amazon link has changed. The old link is dead.
The new link is: http://www.amazon.com/Cop-Hood-Policing-Baltimores-District/dp/0691140081/
But you should search for it yourself with whatever link/referral service you use.
Sorry for the trouble.
Drive slower when it rains.
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.”
This came to me today:
I came across your book at baltimorecrime.blogspot.com, so far I am 50 pages in to it and I have to say that you have an excellent way of speaking the truth. I am a Baltimore police officer […] and I have a B.S. in Criminal Justice from […] (I am debating whether or not to attend Grad School). Thus far, from both my personal experience and academic background everything that you have written seems to be spot on. As I get further into the book, I will keep you posted.
If you are planning on lecturing anywhere in the greater Baltimore-Philly-D.C. area please let me know, I would like to attend.
I’m sure at some point I’ll be speaking in Baltimore. No plans yet, though. I’ll keep you posted.
