'Cop in the Hood' provides insider account of policing in Baltimore

Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District by Peter Moskos. 245 pages (Princeton University Press) ISNB 978-0-691-14008-7.

For anyone interested is what being a police officer in Baltimore City is really like, Peter Moskos’ in-depth, academic, and realist account in Cop in the Hood is a must-read.

Moskos, a former Baltimore City police officer educated at Harvard, worked a year policing the city’s notorious Eastern District. His experiences are detailed in this book along with discussions on race, politics, criminal justice reform, drug legalization, and the prison-industrial complex.

Throughout this book, there are some very intriguing statements made by the author. Among the more interesting details are that official police statistics are manipulated, there isn’t a culture of corruption among officers, almost a third of arrestees are heroin addicts, and around 80% of homicides are drug-related.

Additional points of interest in this book are that more than 10% of men in the Eastern District are murdered before turning 35 years old, most arrests are drug-related, and a large majority of the District’s citizens use illegal drugs.

Amusingly, according to Moskos, new “brands” of drugs are introduced at the beginning of the month to correspond with disability, Social Security, and welfare payments and on New Year’s Eve parts of the city erupt with celebratory gun fire.

By far my favorite part of this book is the numerous quotations from black and white police officers that Moskos excerpts. Here are some good ones:

“[People in the Eastern District are] drugged-out, lazy mother****ers. These people don’t want to work. They want to sit on their ass, collect welfare, get drunk, and make babies. Let them shoot each other.”

“I don’t care what you’re going to write. What’s the worst you’re going to write? That I sleep on the job? Oh well. Yeah, I do and so do you.”

“We can’t do anything [about the drug problem]. Drugs were here before I was born and they’re going to be here after I die. All they pay us to do is herd junkies.”

“Junkies don’t have rights. They’re not even people. Who gives a flying f*** about a junkie!?”

“If people saw how f***ed-up everything is, they’d stop blaming poverty or racism and just want the whole place torn down.”

“Fells Point has Mexicans moving in, but they’re better than the hillbillies. At least the Mexicans want to work. They may be poor, but they don’t trash their neighborhood and homes like the white trash does.”

“I got nothing against black people. I just don’t like these black people. I don’t care what color they are. If they were white people acting this way, I wouldn’t like them any better. Hell, I’d probably like them worse.”

“I’m from here. I speak three languages: English, bad English, and profanity!”

I like these quotes because they show that cops aren’t politically correct like countless politicians. Instead, cops are just regular people doing a tough job.

After his experience policing the “War on Drugs” in Baltimore, Moskos is blunt about it: “It would simply be ironic if it weren’t so tragic: drug prohibition creates an unregulated, chaotic, and violent drug culture.” Moskos believes efforts to end the use of drugs and its trafficking have failed and paraphrases President Clinton in writing that “drugs should be safe, legal, and rare.”

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.

For more information: Read Moskos’ op-ed piece in the Washington Post calling for the legalization of drugs and watch the video of Moskos below. Also, see the headlines below.