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Tag: cop in the hood

  • Celebrating six years as a blockhead!

    Like fellow “blockhead” Jay Livingston, I can’t believe I’ve been doing this “writing for free” crap since 2007. Like Jay, I decided to look back at my more popular posts. Unlike Jay, blogger/google doesn’t allow one to look at the past year. The choices jump from “last month” to “all time.” So let’s look at my five most popular posts of all time.

    Starting with number 5, with 4,629 page views, a 2008 post in which I cast a critical gaze at St. Louis. St. Louis: Coulda Been a Contender. I’ve found that any time you say something bad about a place people call home (whether it’s St. Louis or Newburgh, NY), some people kinda get upset. Who would’ve thunk it? (Luckily, Baltimoreans have thick skin.)

    With 4,766 page views, coming it at number 4, is Sneak-and-Peek from 2011. I observed that parts of The Patriot Act are used not to fight terrorism but the War on Drugs. I have no idea why this simple repost from New York Magazine got so many views. I can only guess it comes up high on some google search. Or maybe all the views are from the NSA.

    Number 3, with 8,231 views, is a funny picture montage What they think I do. This must have gotten shared on some police sites.

    Number 2, with 9,499 views, features my pictures and Memories of a Baltimore Crack House. The Atlantic linked to this. The Atlantic has always supported me and my work. Somebody there must like me. I don’t know who that person is, but thank you!

    Coming in at Number 1, my most popular post of all time (by a wide 3:1 margin with 27,623 page views), is the Right-Wing Lies of the “welfare” of Larmondo “Flair” Allen. I’m proud to play a small role in the liberal quest for truth. Apparently some 27,000 folks also received a B.S. right-wing email and had the bright idea to actually see if it true. It’s not.

  • Ah, the good ol’ days

    Some of my old police friends my recognize these stories from Slate.com, which are taken from Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan’s soon-to-be bestselling The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office. Tim knows my story well, since his help and editorial vision made Cop in the Hood the rip-roaring success it is.

  • “Peter Moskos doesn’t bullshit”

    Check this out by Michael Corbin in Baltimore’s City Paper: Better of Two Evils. Makes me sound like such a intellectual bad-ass. And potty mouth. Fuckin’-A!

    Seriously though, it is very powerfully written. Makes me want to re-read my own books.

  • The Boys of Summer

    Or, more accurately, “The Baltimore City police men and women of late Fall 2009,” but nobody ever wrote a book with that name.

    I’ve also always wondered just how many of my class are still with the Baltimore Police Department. This seems a rather simple question, but such data, especially if it’s police related, can be surprisingly hard to come by. I hear stories about this person leaving by choice and that person being asked to leave, but I really had no idea. I guessed about half of us were still there.

    Today the Suncame out with with their searchable pay database for every city employee. Boo-ya!

    And since I can can select for police department and sort by date of entry, it’s very easy to get my academy class (and it’s nice to see some of these names after all these years!).

    So, after 11 years, how is the glorious class of 99-5 doing? I’d say fair to middling. When I was in the academy class, most of my fellow trainees assumed that our class was, how do I put this delicately, just slightly sub-par (hey, we can’t all be above average). But who could say for sure?

    There are 30 of the original 51 still left. That’s a 59% retention rate (and similar for men and women). I’m not certain how that compares to other academy classes or police departments (that data is surprisingly hard to get), but I suspect it’s a bit low.

    More revealing is that just 2 of the 31 officers (6.5%) have been promoted (I hear a third is now number 10 on the list).

    So I also looked at every other police officer hired in 2009 (excluding my class, n = 93). The overall promotion rate is 25% (including three lieutenants). Ouch.

    And of course, here’s what every police officer cares about: money. Are we making bank? I don’t think so. I think police (and teachers) should make about $100,000 a year. The average base salary for those in my academy class (11 years experience) is $60,200 (and the city wants to cut it 10%). Those at the rank of officer are making $59,400. Overtime brings the average pre-tax take home up to $71,400. Three guys in my class pulled in more than $40,000 in overtime last year (about 20 hours/week).

    [It seems only fair to tell my salary. As an assistant professor at CUNY with a PhD and 6 years I make $74,133. Plus I made about $2,500 in “overtime,” a.k.a. book royalties. Best of all, nobody shot at me.]

  • “Ethnographic Chutzpah”

    Horn tooting time.

    Just two-and-a-half years after the publication of Cop in the Hood, (the academic world can move at a glacial pace) the American Journal of Sociology reviewed Cop in the Hood. Well worth the wait, I’d say, as the review by Profesor Andrew Papachristos is very favorable: “Ethographic chutzpah…. Perhaps the best sociological account on what it means to police a modern ghetto…. Tells a great story.” Of course it’s deeper than that:

    WhileCop in the Hoodcontributes to several debates within urban sociology and criminology, the book’s greatest contribution is the demystification of police and police culture. Moskos describes his fellow officers not as power-hungry, thrill-seeking bullies, but as a well-meaning yet frustrated lot who marshal their own foibles and strengths to cope with unique job conditions and ambiguous political and legal decrees.

    Like any author, I’m always very pleased to have my book praised for what it is rather knocked down for what it isn’t. But I really appreciate how very well Papachristos (I’m assuming he felt no undue pressure from the Greek mafia, but I do owe him a souvlaki) captured and appreciated exactly what I was trying to do. It’s an extremely well written and concise review.

    In fact, I think he makes some of my points better than I do.

    Full access to police sources leaves readers with a simple yet important finding: just like those neighborhood residents whom they “serve and protect,” police devise complex ways to administer formal and informal social control as they negotiate social mandates, individual morality, professional obligations, and personal networks. To be sure,Cop in the Hoodis no apologia for police, nor does it dismiss the harsh consequences of the war on drugs. Instead, it offers a candid investigation of the day-to-day arenas in which legal policies are enacted as well as the power afforded to those charged with enforcing the law. The end result is perhaps the best sociological account on what it means to police a modern ghetto.
    …
    The interesting point here is that while academics might wish to employ our chic cultural rhetoric to make sense of police behavior, cops have a rather clear notion of culture and crime that they use to explain both crime and their individual and professional responses to it. The task for the academic reader, then, is to figure out ways to rectify our own valued nomenclature with the empirical reality described by Moskos.

    If you couldn’t follow that (yes, Gotti, I’m thinking of you), don’t worry. But you can read the whole review here.

  • Enlightening and Authoritative

    It’s not too late to read my book. Don’t take my word for it. Take Sean O’Donnell’s of the Baltimore Republican Examiner:

    For anyone interested is what being a police officer in Baltimore City is really like, Peter Moskos’ in-depth, academic, and realist account inCop in the Hood is a must-read…. Whether one agrees or not with Moskos’ opinion on drug legalization, one will most certainly enjoy this enlightening and authoritative work on policing a rough area of Baltimore City.

  • Ethnography Bashing

    I don’t mind a mixed review of my book (Contemporary Sociology), but it does bother me when a reviewer calls my participant-observation research a “major flaw.” It’s like a man who doesn’t like olive oil, fish, and lamb bashing a Greek restaurant for being too “Mediterranean.” If you don’t like the concept, don’t review it.

    Basically, goes the tired old sociological argument, because I was a cop, I can’t see police objectively. This is called “going native.” Like all sociology majors, I learned this in college (in my case as a Princeton sophomore in Professor Howard Taylor’s most excellent “Introductory Research Methods in African American Studies”–the class that made me a sociologist!).

    While going native certainly is a possibility. Given the sum of my book and writing, to say I did so is a bit absurd.

    The reviewer writes:

    This raises the possibility that [Moskos] was not privy to some of the more sensitive issues and events that may have happened. He states categorically that he witnessed no instances of illegal police behavior while on the Baltimore Police Department which suggests that he failed to encounter them either because he was shielded from such events or he did not define them as illegal because he had adopted the police view that such activities were necessary to get the job done.

    Actually, I stated categorically I saw no instances of police corruption. I wrote a bit about illegal behavior: “High-arrest officers push the boundaries of consent searches and turn pickets inside-out. Illegal (and legal) searches are almost always motivated by a desire to find drugs.” So much for a thorough reading.

    I did write this (p. 78):

    I policed what is arguably the worst shift in the worst district in Baltimore and saw no police corruption. … Incidents do happen, but thepolice cultureis not corrupt. Though overall police integrity is very high, some will never be convinced. But out of personal virtue, internal investigation stings, or monetary calculations, the majority–the vast majority–of police officers are clean.

    Sometimes reality causes cognitive dissonance to people with strong prejudices. I guess the idea that most cops are clean (cleaner than professors, I like to add) is just too shocking for some in academe. Rather than face up to one’s own anti-police biases, I guess it’s easier just to bash ethnography.

  • Foot Patrol: The Colonel Speaks

    Continuing my conversation with Colonel (Ret.) Margaret Patton of the Baltimore Police department, I recently received this email:

    I read your added chapter[the new chapter in the paperback edition of Cop in the Hood].You should be a police chief. The term “Policing Green” is very catchy and, more important, very smart.

    Foot patrol is a key to addressing crime and working with the community in a positive manner. The idea of using a monetary carrot for the officer and linking it with the reduction of the use of gasoline was brilliant.

    My husband, before he made sergeant, was a foot officer in south Baltimore before it was a trendy place to be but he loved his foot post. Cross Street Market was on his post and he still remained friends with many of the people he met during that time. I remember meeting the “Chicken Man” who sold chickens (of course) at the market soon after we married. Several of his friends from his foot post came to his funeral as well as his fellow foot officers from “way back when”.

    My husband always said that he was sorry that he ever took the sergeant’s test because he enjoyed his foot post so much. He said that a foot post was one of the department’s secret gems (“gems” may be my word but you understand).

    We speak, but who listens?

  • From Amsterdam: Lessons on controlling drugs

    Hot off the virtual presses, here’s an article I wrote appearing in this coming Sunday’s Washington Post. I talk about the difference in policy and police attitudes toward drugs in Amsterdam and in the U.S.:

    In Amsterdam, the red-light district is the oldest and most notorious neighborhood. Two picturesque canals frame countless small pedestrian alleyways lined with legal prostitutes, bars, porn stores and coffee shops. In 2008, I visited the local police station and asked about the neighborhood’s problems. I laughed when I heard that dealers of fake drugs were the biggest police issue — but it’s true. If fake-drug dealers are the worst problem in the red-light district, clearly somebody is doing something right.

    and

    History provides some lessons. The 21st Amendment ending Prohibition did not force anybody to drink or any city to license saloons. In 1933, after the failure to ban alcohol, the feds simply got out of the game. Today, they should do the same — and last week the Justice Department took a very small step in the right direction.

    Read all about it!

  • Me and Lou Dobbs

    I was on Lou Dobbs today.
    I didn’t have the heart to tell him I love immigrants.
    You can read more (and see the video) here.