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tenderfoot

(8,424 posts)
Mon Jun 8, 2020, 12:34 AM Jun 2020

Philly burned this week; just across the river Camden did not.

NYTs Kate Zernike story on Camden, two years after it dismantled its police force and started over.




Camden Turns Around With New Police Force

CAMDEN, N.J. — In the summer of 2012, the year this city broke its own record for homicides, there were 21 people murdered here. This summer, there were six.

Just as remarkably, with shootings down 43 percent in two years, and violent crime down 22 percent, Osvaldo Fernandez now lets his sons walk to school alone. Nancy Torres abandoned plans to move to Florida. And parents from Center City Philadelphia are bringing their children here — notoriously one of the nation’s poorest, most crime-ridden cities — to play in a Little League that has grown to 500 players from 150 in its first season three years ago.

It has been 16 months since Camden took the unusual step of eliminating its police force and replacing it with a new one run by the county. Beleaguered by crime, budget cuts and bad morale, the old force had all but given up responding to some types of crimes.

Dispensing with expensive work rules, the new force hired more officers within the same budget — 411, up from about 250. It hired civilians to use crime-fighting technology it had never had the staff for. And it has tightened alliances with federal agencies to remove one of the largest drug rings from city streets.

<snip>

No one, least of all law-enforcement officials, is declaring victory on crime: Camden has seen too many promises and rescue packages to be so bold.

Still, the improvements have come faster than anyone predicted. And while the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has drawn attention to long-simmering hostilities between police departments and minority communities, Camden is becoming an example of the opposite.

“We’re not going to do this by militarizing streets,” Chief Thomson said. Instead, he sent officers to knock on doors and ask residents their concerns. He lets community leaders monitor surveillance cameras from their home computers to help watch for developing crime.

The police have held meet-the-officer fairs at parks and churches, attended baseball games and sent Mister Softee trucks into neighborhoods. Officers stand at school crossings and on corners where drugs and violence flourished. Chief Thomson’s theory is that in a city of 77,000, there are thousands more well-intentioned people than bad, and that the police must enlist them to take back the streets.

“For a city to be prosperous, it needs to be safe and busy,” he said. “The police are a variable in that equation, but we are just one variable.” He tells his officers that he measures their success not in tickets written, but in the number of children riding bicycles on the street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/nyregion/camden-turns-around-with-new-police-force.html

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Philly burned this week; just across the river Camden did not. (Original Post) tenderfoot Jun 2020 OP
Camden has also installed advanced panopticon video surveillance on most streets, esp. high-risk. TheBlackAdder Jun 2020 #1
Philly did not burn. Loki Liesmith Jun 2020 #2
I copied the headline from the author's twitter post... tenderfoot Jun 2020 #4
Good to KNOW!! Cha Jun 2020 #5
Bookmarking Nevilledog Jun 2020 #3
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