52 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
Nation
person in Camden was 8% more likely to have a po-
lice officer use force on him or her than a white per-
son was.
Those numbers only started to change later. In
2014, the department instituted an “Ethical Protec-
tor” training program, after which excessive- force
complaints began to fall, and about a year ago the
department stepped it up with a new use-of-force
policy—vetted by the Fraternal Order of Police and
ACLU alike—that authorized deadly force only “as a
last resort” and that was touted as a potential model
for better policing nationwide.
Today, in Camden, officers have a mandate to
de-escalate as often as possible. The department
uses a virtual simulator to train officers to handle
a wide variety of situations, from a homeless man
who refuses to budge from in front of someone’s
garage to a distressed man ready to throw his child
off a bridge. In that training, whatever the scenario,
the officer’s goal is to preserve life. The simulator
isn’t the only technology in which the county has
invested. The department can monitor blocks that
are overdue for a visit and keeps tabs on whether
officers are lingering in their cars or walking the
streets. It reviews body-camera footage from the
streets, studies it and tries to correct any mistakes
officers might have made.
Joseph Wysocki, who was part of the old depart-
ment, has served as the new department’s chief
since 2015. His goal is to get his officers to build re-
lationships with the citizens whose safety is their
job. “You have to work with the community. It’s
not us vs. them, it’s us together,” he says. Wysocki
proudly recounts a department barbecue at which a
local kid at first had to be cajoled into asking an offi-
cer for a plate, only to later be spotted playing basket-
ball in the street with that same officer.
Some evidence in favor of the relaunch is
not just anecdotal. Murders are down 63%, and
robberies are down 60%. Overall violent crime
is down 42%. It’s hard to pinpoint cause and
effect here: these shifts took place in the context
of a national period of economic growth, which
reached Camden too, to an extent, as the poverty
rate sank by over 5% by 2019. The unemployment
rate, 10% in early 2012, came down to 4.4% by
the beginning of this year; though the exact link
between economic conditions and crime has
proved hard to pin down, a certain amount of
improvement in safety may be mere correlation.
But some community members, like Morton, say
the new police force has helped the city get there.
And the park where his Little Leaguers play is no
longer a drug-trade hot spot.
“Before the change, the police department did
not care about our safety,” Morton says. “When they
made the transition, they built partnerships with
members of the community.”
That Camden is home to a community is plain
to see. Its residential areas look worn down, but
people who walk the streets wave to one another.
Morton knows, however, that this community
was skeptical about whether the relaunch would
bring the needed change. To him, just as the police
had to be held accountable, the people had to be
open-minded about the possibility of moving
beyond the past.
To others, seven years under new management
has not resolved that skepticism. For one thing, the
department still does not ethnically reflect the city
it is protecting. “There is one Black captain,” says
the Rev. Levi Combs III of Camden’s First Refuge
Progressive Baptist Church. Metro police officers
are disproportionately white, and most don’t live in
the city. Combs dismisses the department’s rebirth
as primarily a financial decision—city officials esti-
mate they could be saving up to $16 million a year
with the department under county control, in part
by escaping perks that were baked into the old con-
tract, though the savings in early years were not in
fact as high as predicted—and the supposed com-
munity buy-in as mere window dressing. “It’s mar-
keting the city of Camden to attract more white
people and more affluent people,” he says. “We
have a lack of jobs, homeownership, lack of educa-
tion resources.”
Advocates of a new safety paradigm see Camden
as a case study in the boundaries of reform. Freed of
a recalcitrant union and trained to prioritize life, po-
lice may well be seen as less of a threat by the com-
munity they are meant to serve, they say. But that’s
a long way from a transformational model of safety
built not around policing but instead around in-
vestment in the lives of Black citizens, who for de-
cades were viewed as a source not of solutions but
of threats. “There is no investment in our commu-
nity,” says Combs.
Sure enough, even as Camden’s experience has
become the go-to example of revamped policing,
the defunding movement has hit there too; after all,
when the department was reimagined, the size of
the force increased. While Wysocki acknowledges
that Camden’s original police department was
essentially “defunded” when it was shut down,
he worries that a national movement to shift
dollars away from law enforcement may hit
departments in their budgets for officer training,
the very aspect he believes has contributed to his
city’s turnaround.
Camden shows that it’s possible to hit restart on a
police department and to have public safety improve
after such a move. But the city also shows that such a
drastic change doesn’t guarantee a fix—and, perhaps,
that there’s little reason for a department to wait to
be defunded before it starts prioritizing the people
it’s meant to protect.