Can a New Police Force Turn Around Camden, N.J., One of the Nation's Most Violent Cities?

In hopes of reducing the city's high crime rate, Camden, N.J., made a controversial and unprecedented move a year ago to replace its police force.

At the Community Baptist Church on Mt. Ephraim Avenue in the heart of the Whitman Park neighborhood of Camden, N.J., stained-glass windows are riddled with bullet holes. On a recent Saturday afternoon, pastor David King pointed out street corners near the church where men have been gunned down. Sometimes, he says, people have run inside the sanctuary for safety when drug deals go bad. On the streets of Whitman Park, King says, “there’s like a drug script that never shuts down.”

Whitman Park has become ground zero in the battle to take back one of America’s most crime-plagued cities. For the past several years, the crime rate in Camden, just across the river from Philadelphia, has consistently ranked in the top five nationally. In 2012, Camden saw a record-high murder rate that rivaled national rates of the most dangerous countries. Signs of crime are everywhere. Houses and storefronts sit abandoned. Some of the empty buildings have become hotbeds for drug crime; others serve as makeshift memorials to those who have been killed, with names and dates spray-painted on front porches. A “stop the violence” mural decorates the base of a rusting water tower.

In the face of this violence, Camden did something quite radical: It disbanded its 141-year-old police force. In its place, the surrounding county formed a new police department that it wants to expand to other jurisdictions outside the city. The Camden County Police Department rehired most of the laid-off cops, along with nearly 100 other officers, but at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city.

Source