In 2025, Camden, New Jersey – a town of about 72,000 citizens that sits around the Delaware River from Philadelphia – skilled its first homicide-free summer time in just about 50 years.
The town ended the yr with 12 homicides – a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a in keeping with capita price 18 occasions the nationwide moderate on the time.
I’m a professor of prison justice who wrote a e-book on police reform efforts in Camden during the last 15 years. The beautiful turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly shaped Camden County Police Division, which was once established in 2013 and changed the Camden Town Police Division, to be hailed as a fashion of reform. In 2015, then-President Obama visited the town to focus on the development made.
Sure nationwide and global consideration on police reform in Camden persisted in 2020 following the homicide of George Floyd. This consideration stemmed from the Minneapolis town council’s unanimous resolution to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Division and get started anew – a lot as Camden had accomplished seven years previous.
But one matter that I consider such discussions and statement steadily disregard is the position that group and activist teams, in addition to native media, performed in higher policing through the Camden County Police Division.
County takeover of town police division
Beneath-policing got here to outline the general years of the Camden Town Police Division, or CPD. Police presence in the neighborhood was once in large part absent.
Against this, the Camden County Police Division, or CCPD, started its new mandate with an competitive, broken-windows taste of policing that incorporated focused on low ranges of dysfunction and quality-of-life offenses, like loitering.
Citizens had been keen on this new competitive stance. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, researchers and native media used New Jersey’s Open Public Information Act to gather measures of the CCPD’s job.
This knowledge pointed to a troubling upward push in officer-initiated automobile and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of drive, and citizen lawsuits of over the top drive thru 2014 and 2015.
CCPD officials in 2014 made 60,352 overall stops, together with 16,742 of folks on foot. The in keeping with capita price of pedestrian stops exceeded the charges in each New York Town and Philadelphia all over the ones towns’ top stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, sooner than stop-and-frisk ways spurred court-ordered reforms.
Past the stops, CCPD officials issued greater than 6,000 citations from Would possibly 1, 2013, when the brand new division introduced, during the finish of the yr. They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. All the way through its first yr or so, the CCPD’s overall choice of circumstances in municipal courtroom larger through just about 30% relative to the yr prior.
In a similar fashion, the choice of tickets issued for minor infractions – comparable to driving a bicycle with no bell or a mild, and disorderly behavior – rose steeply. For instance, the choice of citations for having tinted automotive home windows greater than tripled, whilst citations for no longer having right kind automotive lighting fixtures or reflectors greater than quadrupled.
A Camden County Police Division officer watches demonstrators participate in a Black Lives Topic protest march in Camden, New Jersey, on June 13, 2020.
Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto by way of Getty Pictures
Backlash to broken-windows policing
Citizen lawsuits in opposition to CCPD alleging over the top use of drive larger from 35 in 2013 to 65 in 2014.
Organizations just like the Camden County bankruptcy of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up consideration to those figures through issuing bulletins and press briefings. At the identical day in Would possibly 2015 that President Obama heralded the CCPD, the ACLU-NJ issued a scathing rebuke to the President’s message. It learn, partially: “Before we hold Camden up as a model of community policing, we must address the troubling indicators that point to Camden’s use of practices that appear to take a page from a broken windows approach to policing.”
Former President Barack Obama excursions the Actual-Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Heart on the Camden County Police Division headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, on Would possibly 18, 2015.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Mobilized citizens and teams, together with clergy contributors, made it transparent that they didn’t respect this point and form of competitive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Celebrity-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the protection of Camden’s heavy-handed ways.
What adopted was once a whole alternate in conduct a number of the CCPD from an job, coaching and coverage point of view. The numbers and charges of police stops declined. CCPD officials started issuing extra warnings in comparison to tickets, to the purpose that “warnings over summonses” turned into an unofficial slogan of the dep..
The highest brass at CCPD sought out and applied two kinds of de-escalation coaching, beginning within the spring of 2015, for all officials. The CCPD additionally began to discover a whole overhaul of the company’s use of drive coverage. It in the end followed a extra restrictive coverage that emphasised de-escalation and the sanctity of existence, whilst prohibiting ways like chokeholds and capturing at shifting automobiles. The CCPD’s cutting edge coverage even impressed the New Jersey Lawyer Normal to redesign its statewide coverage years later.
Because of this, lawsuits of use of drive, generally, and of over the top drive dropped from 43 in 2015 to twenty-eight in 2016, and declined to 16 in 2017 and simply 3 in 2018. Such lawsuits have most often been within the unmarried digits each and every yr since.
The CCPD merits credit score for course-correcting. However I consider it’s vital to bear in mind the place that impetus got here from: group and activist teams, in addition to native media consideration.
Many fewer murders, however chronic demanding situations
Camden has unquestionably made development. The town’s murder price in 2025 was once 4 occasions the nationwide moderate – a marked alternate from 18 occasions the nationwide moderate in 2012. Homicides around the nation have additionally declined in recent times.
But, issues persist. Camden remains to be a perennial contender for probably the most violent town in New Jersey. In spite of a $1.6 billion financial package deal from the state to the town all over the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the type of tax subsidies to inspire companies to both keep in or relocate to Camden, virtually each and every census tract is likely one of the maximum socially and economically deprived within the state. Maximum corporations that obtain tax breaks don’t make use of a significant choice of Camden citizens.
The town is racially segregated from the remainder of Camden County and the wider South Jersey area.
Individually, Camden, like maximum different towns, is based an excessive amount of at the police, giving them a monopoly on public protection. I consider each the town and the CCPD will have to take a cue from puts like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to seek out cutting edge tactics to collaborate and interact extra with group teams, trade associations and different non-police entities. In combination they are able to co-produce public protection and take a extra holistic solution to lowering crime, violence and dysfunction.
