Today’s New York Times has an article about a gang member being convicted under anti-terrorism laws. The only thing that surprises me is the surprise. The article states: “Other states have used their terrorism statutes, which were seen as largely ceremonial when they were introduced because major terrorism cases were likely to be prosecuted by the federal government.” There’s a…
Category: Police
Lead free equals crime free?
There’s a piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine with an interesting link between lead and crime. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes wrote a paper linking the crime drop in the 1990s to getting the lead out of gasoline in the 1970s. This is hardly conclusive, but it is interesting. There’s still a lot of lead in Baltimore, mostly in the…
Cop in the Hood! All new material!! Plagiarism Free!!!
Well the second claim is true even if the first claim is a bit of an exaggeration. For anybody who has ever turned a PhD dissertation into a book (uh, if you’re reading this, odds are you have), you may wonder, just how different was my book from my dissertation. Hopefully a lot, because dissertations almost always suck. My adviser,…
Baltimore crack house
#1) 1900 Block of E Eager. 1906 E Eager is the third house (with awning) from Mr. George’s corner laundromat. Two short blocks North of Johns Hopkins Hospital, this corner (Wolfe and Eager) is one of the “hottest” (but hardly the only) drug corners in the neighborhood, heroin and crack are sold around the clock, rain or shine. Most of…
Struggling NYPD mother caught in welfare bust
When I tell you that a New York City police officer was caught milking the welfare system, your first thought should be, “what’s a police officer doing on welfare?!” Good question, thanks for asking. The starting salary of the NYPD is $25,100 a year. Granted it goes up a lot after 6 months, but still. How can you live off…
Explosive
Here’s the text for the back of the book. It makes everything sound so exciting that even I want to re-read my book… 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…
Cover Design
This is the fun part of writing a book: having other people do work after you’re done. This will be the cover. I like it.
The problems of ethnography peer review
Way back when, I submitted an article to a prominent ethnography journal. Time passed. Nothing happened. I submitted the article elsewhere. It was reviewed, accepted and published this past summer. Yesterday I received a reply from the journal. Rejection. I have never been in the somewhat awkward a position to receive a rejection for a published article. (There were good…
Dog fight
So Michael Vic apologized for dog fighting. I don’t believe him. He likes dog fighting. He’s not the only one. There’s lots of dog fighting in the Eastern District. That’s just the way it is. Many cops I worked with were very upset at animal mistreatment. One time I answered a call for a pit bull on somebody’s stoop. The…
