Cop in the Hood
by Peter Moskos · first published 2008
9mentions
5recommended by
5HN commenters
2008–2016first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
A sociologist's firsthand account of a year on patrol in Baltimore's Eastern District, showing how city police are trained and how officers work day to day. For readers of policing, criminal justice, and urban life.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…loaded cost of a single police officer is six figures, with potentially explosive defined-benefit pensions and benefits just to make things fun. Moreover, like in many big cities (read Peter Moskos _Cop In The Hood_ for details), the squad car patrol tactics used in Chicago do a terrible job of suppressing gun crime. Over a 24 hour period this holiday weekend, we had 25 gunshot injuries (god knows how many illegal…
on “Gunshot detection system transforms and raises issues ” ↗For a good insight into how city police are trained, I recommend reading Cop In The Hood by Peter Moskos. Peter joined the Baltimore Police and describes how they were taught to "own the situation", which in effect means responding with escalating force until the situation is under control.…
on “What I Saw in Ferguson” ↗…heavily-armed police spending most of their working hours either in a squad car or actively handling a disturbance, rather than walking a beat, is a modern one. It's something Peter Moskos laments in Cop In The Hood, which is a pretty decent book on the practices of modern police forces written by a sociologist who served for a year as an experiment. Beat policing is not one of the most dangerous occupations in…
on “To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]” ↗…the full article but I imagine this illustrates the darker side of CompStat. Along the same lines, some book recommendations: _Armed and Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman_, by Gina Gallo _Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District_, by Peter Moskos The second title covers the real-life setting for "The Wire."
on “The NYPD Tapes” ↗I liked Moskos "Cop In The Hood", as a quick easy read; a lot of the rest of what I've read are cop blog posts or policy papers. Two good example of problematic management techniques: * All-car patrols, where police officers are either…
on “Good Samaritan Backfire” ↗Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District is also good. http://www.amazon.com/Cop-Hood-Policing-Baltimores-District/...
on “How Cops Really Want to Police” ↗…for them. But society also won't work if everyone routinely refuses to cooperate with the police, who are dependent on our support to get the important stuff in their charter done. I highly recommend "Cop in the Hood", a sociologist's writeup of a year spent as a Baltimore East Side patrol cop, for insight into all the crazy dynamics at play here.
on “What happens when you refuse to answer a passport control officer's questions” ↗…Body Emission Scans for people getting on airplanes, for the explicit search for explosives - so I might even be to the right of you on that topic. And, as a fan of The Wire, I'll certainly track down "Cop in the Hood". Thanks.
on “What happens when you refuse to answer a passport control officer's questions” ↗…happened already, though, is that the police aren't generally trawling through the Gmail accounts of drug suspects. They have more drug suspects on eyewitness and hand-to-hands than they can deal with; read _Cop in the Hood_ for examples of state prosecutors refusing to pursue cases because drugs seized from suspects "could, for all the apprehending officer knew, have been an Oreo cookie". This is mostly just a fun topic…
on “Warrantless cell phone search gets a green light in California” ↗