the highest crime rates in the country. Even so, says
Morton, the members of the city’s understaffed po-
lice force spent their time in their cars or planted
behind their desks.
“When you think of shootings, you think they
happen in the evening or at night,” says Wasim
Muhammad, a lifelong resident of Camden and min-
ister of its Muhammad’s Temple of Islam No. 20.
“We started having gunfire in broad daylight down-
town. It was just out of hand.” And, he says, the po-
lice weren’t helping. In his view, the department was
like a structure too unsteady to be worth shoring up:
“Sometimes a building can be so damaged it’s not
that we’ve got to repair the building; we’ve got to
tear the building down and start a new one.”
Which is, essentially, what the city did. At the
time, its budget was already running at a deficit,
and statewide financial issues led then New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie to cut state aid that paid the
salaries of hundreds of Camden city workers. Nearly
half of the police department was laid off in 2011,
and because the union was unwilling to negotiate
pricey elements of their contract, no new officers
were hired. When 2012 saw an all-time-high mur-
der rate, the county and local government had the le-
verage to disband the department entirely; even the
union couldn’t stop the move, not that it didn’t try.
The department relaunched in 2013, under county
control rather than the city’s. Many of the laid-off
officers were rehired for the revamped department.
Also new: when the department reunionized, it was
under new leadership— leadership that Camden
County communications director Dan Keashen says
is committed to working with the local government
to keep costs reasonable.
County freeholder director Louis Cappelli Jr.
and former Camden mayor Dana Redd say they had
two main objectives when they relaunched the
department : reduce the crime rate, and make cit-
izens feel safer. For Redd, a Camden native, this
meant making sure residents had a voice in what
the department would look like. “That’s probably
the side that I’m very proud of, because while we
were going through the difficult times in Camden,
I spent quite an enormous amount of time meeting
with the community, communicating with people,”
Redd says. “I wanted to assure them that we weren’t
going to quit because the going got tough.”
One thing the new department didn’t immedi-
ately solve was use of force and discrimination. As
part of a major investigation of policing in New Jer-
sey, in 2018, NJ Advance Media combed through data
from every local department in the state; Camden’s
use of force from 2012 to 2016 was on the high end.
The investigation found a spike in complaints after
the county took control and as crime began to drop;
the vast majority were dismissed by the department.
And even adjusted to account for population, a BlackWITNESS TO CHANGE
Wasim Muhammad and
his sons Nafi and Haafiz;
Minister Muhammad says
that when conditions in
Camden were so bad that the
city “started having gunfire
in broad daylight downtown,”
police “weren’t helping”