'Cop' Reveals Human hood

In terms of popular culture, the year 2008 has been very good to the ’hood. With the recent run of popular HBO show “The Wire,” the drama of the American inner-city has earned critical street cred: everyone is talking about it. The recently released “Cop in the Hood” capitalizes on this spike in interest about the worst drug markets of Baltimore, Md., as it brings a sociologist’s eye to the situation that captivated the interest of millions nationwide.

Peter Moskos, a professor at the City University of New York, obtained special permission from the Baltimore Police Department to serve as a policeman for one year, and “Cop in the Hood” is the result. His book offers an intensely personal perspective on the hopelessness of city life, revealed through his experiences with Baltimore drug traffickers, addicts, and police officers. In “Cop,” Moskos is able to take a real hard look at drug crime in America and find human beings in that hardscrabble world.

Reflecting the career track of every police officer, Moskos’ tale begins at the Police Academy. The reader quickly discovers the dysfunctional nature of police work, piles of red tape, overly hierarchical and often contradictory management, and a culture that values loyalty, silence, and self-preservation over effective detective work and transparency—what Moskos calls the “Blue Wall.” With such absurdities, we begin to see how poorly the academy prepares its cadets to combat Baltimore’s violent drug markets.

But the real red meat of “Cop in the Hood” is, as its title suggests, the brutality and absurdity of police life outside the walls of the Police Academy. Moskos depicts the inner-city police districts of East Baltimore as completely overrun by the local drug market, where dealers hawk cocaine and heroin stored in perfume vials to eager addicts at all hours of the day. Given the impossibility of arresting thousands of users and dealers (often children or teenagers without any other means of income), the situation Moskos paints is bleak: the police, handicapped by unnecessary regulations, are ultimately performing a futile exercise.

Despite the depressing nature of his subject, Moskos manages to draw a colorful portrait of Baltimore, even adding dashes of dark humor that endow the desperate inner city with humanity. On a disturbance call, Moskos must ascertain whether the relationship of a man and a woman is sexual and therefore legally “domestic,” a task requiring sensitivity to Baltimore slang:

“‘Have you ever had sex?’ sounds like you’re blaming the victim,” he writes. “‘Have you two ever been romantically involved?’ would get laughs and implies a level of romance that may be inappropriate. Slang words abound, but ‘tapping it,’ ‘touching it,’ or ‘spanking it’ (‘it’, of course, being ‘that ass’) are too informal and somewhat gender specific. The best phrase I used was, ‘Have you two ever hit it?’ Linguistically ‘hitting it’ allows a simple yes or no answer.”

Though “Cop in the Hood” is a work of sociology at its core, Moskos chooses to de-emphasize statistical methodology in favor of anecdotal evidence. It may make the book less scientific, but Moskos’ storytelling also makes it entertaining and valuable in its own right. He describes how dealers invent creative names for their wares, including “Red Tops,” “Body Bag,” and “Capone,” each one differentiating his product as if he were selling candy bars. Moskos explains the sophistication of a street-level drug deal—from lookouts and moneymen to slingers and hired muscle—in a way that inspires some awe for such inner-city entrepreneurship. These stories reveal the conditions of Baltimore in a way that is no less useful than methodological research—if you choose to believe what the author claims to have lived through.

“Cop in the Hood” is a quick and easy read that is destined to change many minds about America’s inner-city drug trade. The book vividly depicts the unique narratives of its subjects while making clear that they are all part of the same greater socioeconomic tragedy: junkies who live to find their next fix; drug dealers who kill and destroy lives because they have no other options; police who won’t or can’t make a positive difference for those they serve. In the face of this failure, Moskos concludes, passionately, with an argument for the legalization of drugs, comparing the chaos and crime of modern drug-infested Baltimore to the speakeasies of 1930s Chicago. While Moskos may or may not fully convince you that drugs should be legalized and regulated, he nevertheless makes you aware of the destructiveness of the drug war.

“Cop in the Hood” is a book about personal experiences as a policeman in East Baltimore, but it is equally about America’s national drug problems. Many people don’t know—or don’t want to know—that they exist, but after reading this book, one realizes that the cost of ignorance is too high—and too human.