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 | Cop in the Hood: |
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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 first season of the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire--where he experienced real-life poverty and violent crime firsthand. This revised and corrected edition of Cop in the Hood provides an unforgettable window into the 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. 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 again. Peter Moskos is assistant professor of law, police science, and criminal justice administration at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is a former Baltimore City police officer. "Remarkable. . . . 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. 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 the drugs themselves."--Daniel Horan, Wall Street Journal "Moskos frankly records his experiences with poverty, violence, drugs and despair in the gritty ghetto. 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."--Publishers Weekly "[G]enuinely eye-opening...Moskos offers a compelling account of why a uniformed police patrol 'does little but temporarily disrupt public drug-dealing'--and hence why the 'war on drugs' is so helplessly self-defeating."--Times Higher Education "Truly excellent. This is one of the two or three best conceptual analyses of "cops and robbers" I have read. It is mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution Acknowledgments ix Another Princeton book by Peter Moskos: Link: Subject Areas: | |||||||
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