Excellent Police

The following is an excerpt from The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, out this week from Twelve. On Oct. 29, 1999, Peter Moskos sat in the office of the acting commissioner of the Baltimore City Police Department facing a life-altering choice: sign up for training with Baltimore City Police recruit class 99-5 or return to the Harvard sociology department a failure. Moskos was a sociologist, born and bred. His father, Charles, a renowned military sociologist, was best known as the originator of President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton with a degree in sociology, Peter Moskos enrolled in Harvard’s prestigious Ph.D. program (rejection rate: 95 percent) and planned to study policing. Moskos wanted to follow in the footsteps of other sociologists by immersing himself in the lives of ...