Moskos, Peter. Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District.

• Author: Eisenman, Russell
• Position: Book review

Moskos, Peter. Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2008. x + 246 pages. Cloth, $24.95.

This may be one of the best books ever written about cops on the beat, probably because it is written by someone who was a sociology student (now a professor) who spent over a year as a real police officer to learn what it is like. Thus, it was both a research project and real life for Moskos, who worked in the Eastern District, a high crime, high drug area in Baltimore.

Moskos comes across mostly sympathetic to cops, but points out how things really occur. For example, unlike on the television show Cops, where suspects are often read their rights by the arresting officer, Moskos admits that cops almost never do that. For one thing, they may be out of breath after chasing someone, and for another they may want to keep their eye on the suspect instead of looking at a card for the correct recitation of Miranda rights.

Perhaps the author's best insights involve the war on drugs. In his more critical chapters, Moskos writes about how much of a failure this war is and why we should abandon it. His descriptive chapters show that limited success has been achieved in this war. Drug dealers have someone else talk to potential clients and another person actually takes the money and delivers the drug. Thus, it is difficult to prove that they are drug dealers, so they are often either arrested for a lesser charge, such as loitering, or simply run away when the cops show up. Much to the surprise of this reviewer, Moskos (and likely many other police officers) felt good when the dealers ran away, because that cleared up that part of the neighborhood, though likely only for a few hours or, at most, a day. Most of the people dealing drugs in the Eastern District are black, so many blacks end up in jail, at least until they can get out and return to the lucrative profession of dealing drugs.

Often, cops know that someone is a drug dealer, but the District Attorney's office will not prosecute. The police officer may witness a drug deal in progress, and the dealer may actually hand drugs to someone in a car and receive money. But the cop's observations are not...