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My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District
Princeton University Press
April 2008
On Sale: April 29, 2008
242 pages ISBN: 0691126550 EAN: 9780691126555 Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
He provides an unforgettable window into this 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.
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