Tag: cop in the hood

Strand is selling my book for $12.47. I doubt you will ever find it cheaper. But there are only 2 copies in stock. I bet when these 2 are gone, the price will go up. $12.47 is 50% off cover price. I can only get 40% off cover price and I wrote the damn thing! Amazonwith free shipping ($16.47) is always a bargain.

Of course nothing is better than loving your neighborhood book store and getting them to stock Cop in the Hood.

I wish I loved myneighborhood book store. And I’m not the only one, who’s got issues… or two, or three.

Another good review. From Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine:

Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District
Peter Moskos. Princeton Univ., $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-691-12655-5

A Harvard-trained sociologist, Moskos set out to do a one-year study of police behavior. Challenged by Baltimore’s acting police commissioner “to become a cop for real,” he accepted. During his six months in the police academy and 14 months on the street, he “happily worked midnights, generally the least desirable shift” in one of the city’s least desirable precincts: the Eastern District (where HBO’s The Wire is filmed). Moskos frankly records his experiences with poverty, violence, drugs and despair in the gritty ghetto. During “field training,” he first encountered “drug dealers, families broken apart, urban blight, rats, and trash-filled alleys. Inside homes, things are often worse.” Moskos’s overview of policing problems covers everything from arrest quotas, corrupt cops and excess paperwork to the reliance on patrolling in cars, responding to a barrage of 911 calls, rather than patrolling on foot to prevent crimes. Moskos blends narrative and analysis, adding an authoritative tone to this adrenaline-accelerating night ride that reveals the stark realities of law enforcement while illuminating little-known aspects of police procedures.

*…for anybody I policed with. Or if you were in the academy class of 99-5. Odds are I don’t have your contact information, so email me at pmoskos@jjay.cuny.edu. I’d certainly prefer it if you bought your own copy. I don’t get my own book for free. I have to buy it from Amazon.com just like everybody else. But if you wouldn’t buy it otherwise, get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to send you a free copy.

The book is at the printers, the press is excited, and I can offer you a sample from the book. Read Chapter One. Read it, like it, and then buy the book. Release date is May 1 but you can preorder from Amazon. What better way to celebrate May Day than to march under fluttering red banners for the workers of the world while holding aloft a copy of Cop in the Hood?

“Peter Moskos, a sociologist by training, somewhat inadvertently became a police officer. Cop in the Hood is the fortuitous and fascinating result. It gives the reader the real dope from someone with the training and ability to put the street into the larger context. Highly recommended.”
–Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University, cofounder of marginalrevolution.com.

“Cop in the Hood is an extremely valuable study centered on patrolling a drug-infested Baltimore police district. Readers interested in drug policy, criminology, or policing cannot help but to learn a lot from this book. I know that I did, and I am grateful to the author. Many of his insights are eye-opening. His voice is unique and essential in debates concerning drug-policy reforms.”
–Jim Leitzel, University of Chicago

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 Baltimore’s roughest neighborhood—the Eastern District, also the location for the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire—where he experienced the real-life poverty and violent crime firsthand. He provides an unforgettable window into this world that outsiders never see—the thriving drug corners, the nerve-rattling patrols, and the heartbreaking failure of 911.

Moskos reveals the truth about the drug war and why it is engineered to fail—a truth he learned on the midnight shift in Baltimore. 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. Moskos shows how officers in the ghetto are less concerned with those policed than with self-preservation and maximizing overtime pay—yet how any one of them would give their life for a fellow officer. 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.