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 12 months with 12 homicides – a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a in keeping with capita fee 18 occasions the nationwide moderate on the time.
I’m a professor of felony justice who wrote a ebook 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 used to be established in 2013 and changed the Camden Town Police Division, to be hailed as a style of reform. In 2015, then-President Obama visited town to spotlight the development made.
Certain nationwide and global consideration on police reform in Camden endured in 2020 following the homicide of George Floyd. This consideration stemmed from the Minneapolis town council’s unanimous determination to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Division and get started anew – a lot as Camden had achieved seven years previous.
But one subject that I consider such discussions and remark incessantly forget is the position that neighborhood and activist teams, in addition to native media, performed in higher policing by means of 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 used to be 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 have been considering 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 task.
This information pointed to a troubling upward push in officer-initiated automobile and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of drive, and citizen proceedings of over the top drive via 2014 and 2015.
CCPD officials in 2014 made 60,352 general stops, together with 16,742 of folks on foot. The in keeping with capita fee of pedestrian stops exceeded the charges in each New York Town and Philadelphia right through the ones towns’ top stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, earlier than stop-and-frisk techniques spurred court-ordered reforms.
Past the stops, CCPD officials issued greater than 6,000 citations from Might 1, 2013, when the brand new division introduced, throughout the finish of the 12 months. They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. Right through its first 12 months or so, the CCPD’s general choice of circumstances in municipal court docket higher by means of just about 30% relative to the 12 months prior.
In a similar fashion, the choice of tickets issued for minor infractions – comparable to using a bicycle with out a bell or a gentle, 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 correct automotive lighting 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 the use of Getty Pictures
Backlash to broken-windows policing
Citizen proceedings in opposition to CCPD alleging over the top use of drive higher 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 by means of issuing bulletins and press briefings. At the similar day in Might 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 Middle on the Camden County Police Division headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, on Might 18, 2015.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP by the use of Getty Pictures
Mobilized citizens and teams, together with clergy participants, made it transparent that they didn’t respect this point and form of competitive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Megastar-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the protection of Camden’s heavy-handed techniques.
What adopted used to be an entire alternate in conduct a few of the CCPD from an task, coaching and coverage standpoint. 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 forms of de-escalation coaching, beginning within the spring of 2015, for all officials. The CCPD additionally began to discover an entire 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 lifestyles, whilst prohibiting techniques like chokeholds and capturing at transferring cars. The CCPD’s cutting edge coverage even impressed the New Jersey Legal professional Common to redesign its statewide coverage years later.
Consequently, proceedings of use of drive, typically, 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 proceedings have in most cases been within the unmarried digits every 12 months since.
The CCPD merits credit score for course-correcting. However I consider it’s necessary to bear in mind the place that impetus got here from: neighborhood and activist teams, in addition to native media consideration.
Many fewer murders, however chronic demanding situations
Camden has indubitably made development. The town’s murder fee in 2025 used to be 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 bundle from the state to town right through the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the type of tax subsidies to inspire companies to both keep in or relocate to Camden, nearly each and every census tract is without doubt one of the maximum socially and economically deprived within the state. Maximum firms 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.
For my part, Camden, like maximum different towns, is based an excessive amount of at the police, giving them a monopoly on public protection. I consider each town and the CCPD must take a cue from puts like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to search out cutting edge techniques to collaborate and interact extra with neighborhood teams, trade associations and different non-police entities. In combination they may be able to co-produce public protection and take a extra holistic strategy to lowering crime, violence and dysfunction.
