Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District

Abstract

The book focuses on three main themes: the hopelessness of life in the ghetto, the frustration and ultimate futility of police work in the ghetto, and the impact that drugs and drug control have on the first two themes. The final chapter in Cop in the Hood conducts an historical overview of drug criminalization in the United States, commencing with Prohibition and touching on all major legislative milestones to the present time.

Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, by Peter Moskos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 245pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691140087.

In Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos provides a relatively detailed discussion of police work in Baltimore's Eastern District, which he characterizes as one of the worst ghettos in America. The book focuses on three main themes: the hopelessness of life in the ghetto, the frustration and ultimate futility of police work in the ghetto, and the impact that drugs and drug control have on the first two themes. Moskos provides an interesting account of police work in Baltimore, starting with the ineffectiveness of police training and encompassing many of the standard topics covered in academic discussions of police work. The most important of these topics include the use of discretion, the failure of the 911 system, and the overuse of arrest as a police tactic to control interactions with the public. While such discussions are commonplace in the criminological and sociological literature, they frequently are pedantic and theory-laden, a factor which limits their accessibility to a select group of specialists. Moskos overcomes this limitation by using stories (often sensational) to present information and illustrate his arguments. While this approach makes his discussion more interesting and accessible to a wider range of people, it also limits the depth of his analysis. Moskos' ultimate thesis is that U.S. drug laws are completely ineffective and that significant reform, including the legalization of some drugs, is necessary to reduce the stress on police which promotes misconduct.

One of the major strengths of Cop in the Hood is Moskos' use of stories and event histories to illustrate how the Baltimore police bureaucracy and existing laws force patrol officers to engage in manipulative tricks in order to gather evidence, make arrests and maintain order in a legal fashion. Throughout this analysis, Moskos attempts to provide a balance between explaining and justifying police action and criticizing more controversial practices. For example, he notes that most police officers try to establish probable cause to arrest an uncooperative suspect for something, even if it is for a minor offence unrelated to the original reason for initiating contact. He justifies the practice by arguing that police cannot afford to cede control of public spaces to anyone and arresting uncooperative suspects is frequently the only way in which control can be maintained. At the same time, he doesn't hesitate to criticize the use of arrest statistics to measure officer effectiveness and argues that arrest should be used as a last resort, since it represents a failure of more preventative police tactics. The effectiveness of this discussion is heightened by his rich descriptions of ghetto life and the fact that Moskos frequently weaves strands of sociological analysis into these descriptions.

Despite the strengths noted above, the book suffers from several major flaws that limit its usefulness as either a treatise on police culture or a reasoned analysis of the need for drug law reform. One of these flaws centers on the ethnographic methodology used and the manner in which data was collected. The project was carried out while Moskos was a graduate student at Harvard University and joined the Baltimore Police Department in order to conduct research using participant observation and interviews to collect his data. One of the weaknesses of participant observation research is the potential for the researcher to "go native" and lose objectivity; this risk would be heightened by actually being on the line, subject to the same pressures and dangers as the people he was researching. Additionally, Moskos made no attempt to hide his true reason for being in the department and the fact that he would be leaving after a year to write a book. This raises the possibility that he was not privy to some of the more sensitive issues and events that may have happened. He states categorically that he witnessed no instances of illegal police behavior while on the Baltimore Police Department which suggests that he failed to encounter them either because he was shielded from such events or he did not define them as illegal because he had adopted the police view that such activities were necessary to get the job done.

The final chapter in Cop in the Hood conducts an historical overview of drug criminalization in the United States, commencing with Prohibition and touching on all major legislative milestones to the present time. Although, the chapter is easy to read, it is far too brief to provide any detailed understanding of the motivations and effects of different events. As a result, it appears oversimplified and superficial, a weakness that is compounded by the failure to systematically link it to the empirical research reported in the first part of the book. As a result, Cop in the Hood appears as two separate analyses, which are only tenuously linked in the final paragraphs of the last chapter. While it is hard to disagree with many of Moskos' points regarding drug law reform, there is nothing new in them as they simply repeat the academic orthodoxy on the topic of drug control. Further, since he does not outline his arguments in a systematical fashion, they are unlikely to convince anyone who does not already agree with his views.