Tag: good press

There’s an article in Baltimore’s City Paper about my book. It’s a bit harsh and kind of snarky (right down to the ? in the headline), but I’ve got thick skin. It’s quite insightful when he’s not slagging me off personally. And he did very well with the material from the phone interview (really).

He likes my book, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. It isn’t in the nature of an alternative papers to write gushing reviews.

As an objective reader, which I’m not, I enjoyed it. As an author, I’m very happy for the publicity.

The review did leave me with three unanswered questions. I wrote the author. Maybe he’ll get back to me.

1) Did he really think Cop in the Hoodwas just laying around in the “to publish” pile and then “dusted off” by Princeton University Press when they announced The Wire was coming to an end?

2) How come he and the fact checkers (who actually did call) from City Papercouldn’t get my age right?

3) Why say it’s been nine years since I’ve been a cop when it’s been seven? The point would have been just as valid… but he would have had the privilege of actually being right. Nine years ago I wasn’t even in Baltimore.

As they say in the The Wire, malaka.

Update:
To his credit, the reviewer did get back to me. He apologized for his bad math and write the following:

I didn’t mean it to be snarky. I was reading it pretty closely. The Atlantic obviously liked it, as did others. From a Baltimore perspective, it’s frustrating, because the need for a coherent strategy seems to be an essential point. The City Paper is local, and we have to address the issue for locals.

From a Baltimorean’s perspective, the question from the gut is immediately: suddenly Baltimore is famous for its murder rate. In fact, that seems to be a primary artistic resource in this community. When a New Yorker comes down to write about Baltimore’s crime scene — and believe me, getting a New Yorker to come down to Baltimore for any other reason isn’t easy — the first thing people ask: Is that what brought you here? What does this actually tell us about our problems as a city now? Or is Baltimore officially a posterboy for a failed drug war?

Yes, the review was harsh personally, but you have to understand that what you wrote is pretty harsh indictment of our city. When the names aren’t real (as you yourself explain), and the commissioner has done his time and bombards the airwaves with the same old spiels, it’s easy for a Baltimorean who’s following the police force today to wonder how much has changed since then. For us, that’s the primary question, and that’s obviously not the focus of Cop in the Hood. Or of The Wire, for that matter. But it certainly goes hand in hand with the Wire.

Maybe it doesn’t help much, but I really learned a lot about the police force. I also admired your approach to the subject. And you never tried to glamorize anything. I was trying to tell what the book was… and what it wasn’t. It was about police work. It was about the hood. As an academic book, it was clearly well received. But as a book about Baltimore — and that’s what Baltimoreans who pick it up a B &N are going to read it is — it was also frustratingly out-of-date.

My reply:

Thanks for getting back to me. I appreciate it.

I plead guilty to trying not to gear the book exclusively to Baltimore. My editor’s biggest concern (and mine, too) was “why will anybody outside of Baltimore care?” So while the book is about Baltimore, it’s not really supposed to a book about Baltimore, if you catch my drift. So I think your criticism there is very justified. I try and use Baltimore as an archetype of these problems everywhere.

As to the book being set in the past, not much I can do about that. Believe it or not, it took 3 years to write after I got my PhD in 2004. Such is life. But do you really think it’s out of date? Have Baltimore police and the drug trade changed much since then? My police friends all tell me it’s the same as it’s ever been.

I love doing radio interviews. I can wear shorts and be sweaty from biking to the studio. I can cough and drink water and pick my nose (I said I can, not that I did).

It’s so much easier to relax when you’re not wearing makeup, not worried about how you look, and have a cough button.

You can listen to the interview here.

Arnold Ages of the Jewish Post & Opinioncalls Cop in the Hood:

[An] objective, incisive and intelligent account of police work. Moskos’s graphic descriptions of the drug culture in Baltimore’s Eastern District are the most detailed and analytical to be found anywhere. What distinguishes Moskos’s book…is the author’s plea for greater flexibility in addressing the rampant drug crisis.

I love the slogan for the Post & Opinion: “We were politically incorrect before there was PC.”

This review of Cop in the Hood comes from Largehearted Boy. He keeps a music blog and is also reading and reviewing 52 books in 52 weeks:

With our images of policemen and their work too often coming from dramatic television these days, a book like Peter Moskos’Cop in the Hoodis refreshing. A sociologist, Moskos spends a year in the Baltimore police department and shares his experiences from the police academy to the day he leaves the force to return to graduate school. What he shares is eye-opening. Police with the least experience patrol the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the failure of the “war on crime” (and why it failed), the negative effects of modern policemen cruising by police car versus walking the beat.

Moskos keeps an open mind, and reports his experience without bias. He experiences not only adrenalin-surging action, but also the often mind-numbing drudgery and daunting bureaucracy of police work, and notices the effects of a career in law enforcement on his fellow cops.Cop in the Hoodnot only puts into perspective the job of a 21st century police officer, but also examines the sociological effects of modern policing and its true effect on crime.

For one month, enter the coupon code “LHB001” at Atomic Books and receive 15% off this title.

My next book is the graphic novel A People’s History Of American Empire by Howard Zinn, Paul Buhle, and Mike Konopacki.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed Cop in the Hoodtoday. In the small world of books like this, that’s big. And it’s a good review! My only complaint is his assertion in the last paragraph that I lacked the impulse to run toward gunfire. I often did. My heart was big enough to be a good researcher anda good police officer.

A Close Look at Mean StreetsJuly 14, 2008; Page A15

Cop in the Hood
By Peter Moskos
(Princeton, 245 pages, $24.95)

Never Mind “The Wire.”
Here is the real thing.

By DANIEL HORAN

High on the list of things that police officers loathe — and the list is a long one — is the sight of an egghead doctoral candidate approaching the precinct house in the hope of finding a research subject. Among cops it is generally assumed that, no matter how much time an academic researcher may spend on ride-alongs in the field, and no matter how well intentioned he may be, he will remain an outsider, studying a culture that is all but impenetrably foreign to him. Which makes Peter Moskos’s “Cop in the Hood” all the more remarkable and all the more welcome.

Mr. Moskos is an assistant professor of law and political science at New York’s John Jay College. In 1999, as a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, he was granted permission to join a police academy class in Baltimore for the purpose of studying police training. On his second day, though, he was pulled from the class and told that he could not continue. A shift in Baltimore’s political winds had swept out the police commissioner who had approved the project, and the interim commissioner was unreceptive to the idea.

But Mr. Moskos was offered an interesting alternative: He could continue his research, he was told, if he completed the city’s hiring process and became an actual police officer. He accepted the challenge, passing a battery of tests that included the first mile-and-a-half run of his life. In “Cop in the Hood” he acknowledges that having been on the payroll of the organization he was studying presented, in strict academic terms, a potential conflict of interest, but he writes that “a meager paycheck can go a long way to advance the noble pursuit of knowledge, especially since none of my grant applications had been accepted.”

Mr. Moskos completed his training and was assigned to the midnight shift in Baltimore’s Eastern District. He spent 14 months as a patrol officer before returning to Harvard, but in that short time he saw more mayhem than most police officers see in 14 years. The murder rate in Baltimore is six times that of New York City, and the Eastern District is the city’s most violent.

Mr. Moskos discovered that the police academy, with its emphasis on quasimilitary formalities and tedious routines, did little to prepare him for the reality of Baltimore’s meanest streets. Like most rookie police officers, who tend to be law-abiding members of the middle class, he had had little exposure to life in what he unabashedly calls the “ghetto,” where he was routinely called into people’s homes “because the residents have, at some level, lost control.”

He describes in unsparing detail the conditions he found to be all too common — homes “without heat or electricity, rooms lacking furniture filled with filth and dirty clothes, roaches and mice running rampant, jars and buckets of urine stacked in corners, and multiple children sleeping on bare and dirty mattresses.” Entering a “normal” home, one that was “well furnished and clean,” he writes, was “so rare that it would be mentioned to fellow officers.”

A lot of his time on patrol was spent “clearing the corners” of young drug dealers. The task was usually accomplished through a simple assertion of dominance, in which the cops stopped their car and stared the dealers down. The dealers who got the message and moved on were allowed to do so, while those who defiantly returned the stare were detained and often arrested for loitering. As Mr. Moskos discovered, much of police work simply involves the cops exerting their authority, either formally or informally, over those they believe to be lawbreakers. “Every drug call to which police respond,” he writes, “indeed all police dealings with social or criminal misbehavior, will result in the suspect’s arrest, departure, or deference.”

In “Cop in the Hood,” Mr. Moskos manages to capture a world that most people know only through the distorting prism of television and film, where police officers are usually portrayed as quixotically heroic or contemptibly corrupt. “Incidents [of corruption] do happen,” Mr. Moskos says, “but the police culture is not corrupt.”

For all the book’s detail, Mr. Moskos reserves his most passionate writing for a call to abandon the war on drugs. He claims that the drug war — with its violent turf battles and revolving-door cycles of arrest — has caused more social devastation than drugs themselves. This is an opinion much in vogue today, one no doubt shared by most of Mr. Moskos’s colleagues in academia but not by most police officers.

One must admire Mr. Moskos for his willingness to walk in a police officer’s shoes for 20 months. But it is important to remember, while reading “Cop in the Hood,” that though he wore the badge and carried the gun, in his heart he was still a researcher foremost, not a police officer. He lacked the attribute that marks out the genuine cop — that rare and inexplicable impulse to run toward gunfire when other sane people are running away. It is an attribute that may be described and analyzed at Harvard, but it is not often found there.

_____________

Mr. Horan is a police officer in California.

So says Diane Scharper in the Baltimore Sunabout my book, Cop in the Hood. Here’s the whole review:

In his classic book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser claimed that people and places were the twin pillars on which all good nonfiction is built. These three books – all with a local connection – prove that point. Their subjects qualify them as textbooks. Yet they are written so engagingly that any one of them could be beach reading. The secret lies in the authors’ attention to detail, story line, character and setting.

Cop in the Hood By Peter Moskos

When former President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, he outlawed barbiturates, amphetamines and LSD. He also perhaps inadvertently set the stage for today’s system of jailing drug offenders, costing $22,000 per prisoner per year – a total of $8 billion annually – while propelling robbery and murder statistics to record heights. After nearly 40 years, it’s time to admit that this costly war has failed, says Peter Moskos in his Baltimore-based book, Cop in the Hood.

An assistant professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at the City University of New York, Moskos came to Baltimore while a Harvard University graduate student to gather “valid data on job-related police behavior.” It took him three years to turn that data into a Ph.D. dissertation and another three years to write this account.

A Chicago native, Moskos knew Baltimore primarily from the films of John Waters and Barry Levinson, whose depictions of the city differ significantly from the conditions Moskos found. Moskos was both dismayed and fascinated by Baltimore’s Eastern District, which he calls “one of the worst ghettos in America” in terms of “violence, drugs, abandonment, and despair,” much of it caused by drugs.

Chronicling his six months training in the police academy and the 14 months he patrolled Baltimore’s east side, Moskos blends academic writing with techniques of creative nonfiction. Moskos packs his account with anecdotes, details, dialogue and off-the-cuff observations about everything from the Baltimore dialect to ghetto slang to the recipe for crack.

Ultimately, his story is engaging as well as persuasive. As Moskos aptly puts it, “If [after all these years] the war on drugs were winnable, it would already be won.”

I don’t know who this guy is, but I like him because he likes my book. A lot. Certainly more than he likes O’Malley.

You can listen to my appearance on WBAL’s Ron Smith show.