Camden was once the murder capital of America, crime was on a par with Honduras and the police force was peppered with corrupt officers in league with drug dealers.
Then police reform and falling crime statistics turned it into a poster child for better policing as other US cities grappled with race riots and departments fended off allegations of racism over the deaths of unarmed black suspects.
But with the Trump administration pulling back federal support for similar reforms elsewhere, and Camden still the most dangerous city in New Jersey, activists say its problems run too deep for policing alone to be the answer.
“They do what they gotta do. I give them that,” says Marylyn Santiago, a 32-year-old mom of three on disability benefit nodding in the direction of three uniformed police patrolling her trash-strewn block.
“It got better,” she concedes. “Terrible” is how she still describes crime today.
Camden is a small city of less than 80,000 people, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Its crime statistics stood out on a per capita basis. Overwhelmingly African American and Hispanic, an estimated 40 percent live in poverty.
Today heroin and opioids are its biggest problem with 46 fatal overdoses so far in 2017 — compared to 29 in all of 2014.
Change came four years ago, when the city force was disbanded and a new department organized. Officers were sacked, replacements hired and chief Scott Thomson flooded the southern New Jersey city with foot patrols.
Operating on an annual budget of $66 million, officers wear body cameras, street cameras were installed along with sensors that pinpoint gunshots in seconds.
The results were immediate. The number of homicides — 67 in 2012 — fell to 33 in 2014 and just six so far this year, although it rose in 2016 to 44.
Some believe there are still as many shootings, but that people die less often — at least partly because police now “scoop and go” in rushing casualties straight to hospital themselves rather than waiting for ambulances to arrive.
Complaints of excessive police force have also plummeted, down from 65 in 2014 to 31 in 2016 and just seven so far this year.
Patrol officers say they are welcomed by home owners and feared by drug dealers and criminals, many of whom have left or been thrown in jail.
“Obviously the one thing to stress here is being professional at all times, no matter what,” says 47-year-old police officer Louis Sanchez.
Sanchez, whose mother lives in Camden, explains a philosophy in which police try to work more closely with the community, refrain from being overly aggressive but equally nothing is too small to be overlooked.
“You let things go and it starts to build up,” says Sanchez, though giving a ticket is not necessarily the answer.
“The way we look at it, sometimes that person cannot buy that headlight, because guess what they live on a paycheck to paycheck.”
Gwendolyn Cook, a law enforcement chaplain who runs a mentoring program for teenage girls and who calls Thomson a hero, says children as young as 12 are being seduced into a life of crime for lack of jobs, education and opportunity.
Tax breaks are encouraging businesses to invest in the area, but many complain that employment opportunities are few and far between.
– ‘Can’t get the help’ –
“They can bring a thousand more officers, but if these African American and Hispanics in Camden don’t have jobs… that’s not going to change the crime,” Cook said.
She recalls a 16-year-old girl who murdered a 14-year-old boy as part of a gang initiation, slapped with a 30-year prison sentence.
She and her husband tried to help a single mother worried her 14-year-old son was getting involved in drugs, but could not get a letter of recommendation for a program for boys with behavioral problems because he had yet to be arrested.
Then he was picked up with 10 bags of heroin in his pocket. Three weeks later he was arrested for armed robbery. “Now he’s incarcerated,” she told AFP. “You want to save them but you can’t get the help you need to save them,” she added.
Darnell Hardwick, president of the Camden County chapter of the NAACP rights group, complains that too many officers come from outlying suburbs and are whiter than the population, leading to a high attrition rate.
“Our issue is a lot of these people don’t live in the city,” he said. “They’re leaving for places where there is less crime and they can make more money,” he said.
“They cleaned up the streets, but the system is all messed up,” says Santiago.
“We live in a piece of shit area.”
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