Thankfully, the reformed police force actually did gain a reputation for increased friendliness:
A year and a half after Camden tapped Cordero, crime is down. So far in 2014, Camden has had half as many homicides as it did in 2012, which was the city-run force’s last full year of operation (albeit a record high year for murders).
And residents are buzzing about how the city feels different. “I hear less gun activity, and I feel that it’s less likely that I’ll be the victim of a violent crime,” says Pastor Tim Merrill, 56, a lifelong resident of the city who runs a youth leadership program and is the president of the Concerned Black Clergy of Camden. “It’s drastically different in a positive way,” says Lorsely Boogaard, 56, who has resided in Camden for 18 years.
It’s hard to imagine what we saw during the George Floyd protests in Camden without a genuinely increased friendliness:
Across the U.S., protesters have taken to the streets to express rage after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. The demonstrations themselves have led to more police shows of force. In Brooklyn, two cops rammed their New York City Police Department SUVs into a crowd of protesters. In Philadelphia, officers sprayed tear gas at demonstrators who were penned in between a highway and a fence.
But across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in Camden, N.J. (population 74,000), officers left the riot gear at home and brought an ice cream truck to a march on May 30. The police department’s chief, Joseph Wysocki, who is white, brandished a “Standing in Solidarity” poster alongside residents holding “Black Lives Matter” signs.
That Camden was able to demonstrate peacefully without escalation looked like a sign of progress in a city that’s one of the country’s poorest and was once considered its most dangerous. “What we’re experiencing today in Camden is the result of many years of deposits in the relationship bank account,” says Scott Thomson, Camden’s chief of police until 2019.
The reforms Camden made – including the disbandment of the police and the breaking of the union contract – were directly connected to the policy reforms that the department has effected in the last decade:
When the city disbanded its police force, the union contract was invalidated, which allowed Cordero and Metro Police Chief Scott Thomson to assign many more officers to foot patrol in dangerous neighborhoods.
The old city-run force was rife with cops working desk jobs, which Cordero saw as a waste of money and manpower. He and Thomson hired civilians to replace them and put all uniformed officers on crime fighting duty. Boogaard says she didn’t see a single cop during the first year she lived in the city. “Now I see them all the time and they make friendly conversation.” Pastor Merrill says the old city-run force gave off a “disgruntled” air, and the morale of Metro police is noticeably better. “I want my police to be happy,” he says.
Another coup: In Metro’s first year, Cordero and Chief Thomson scored a one-year exemption from state civil service rules, which severely limit the discretion that police chiefs have in hiring and promoting their staff. That made it possible for them to break rank and quickly elevate talented junior officers. On Cordero’s initiative, Metro replaced the basic aptitude test for screening new recruits mandated by civil service, which “has nothing to do with law enforcement.” The new test was geared toward identifying candidates with interpersonal skills; a sample essay question asked aspiring Camden cops to recount a “difficult situation” in which they “displayed empathy and sensitivity toward others.”
Cordero also redesigned the field-training program to stress community-building tactics. “The new officers were taught that when they walk the streets they have to go meet people, introduce themselves, and ask people what they’re concerned about,” he says.
“As police, we sometimes forget that we operate by the consent of the community,” says Cordero, “and our success is determined by the community.” This philosophy stems from Cordero’s background as a high-ranking commander with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), where he spent time in a division of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent body that investigates instances of alleged police misconduct. Later he was the commanding officer of the NYPD’s community advocates office.
His goal was to shift perceptions of crime, not just improve stats. In the mid-1990s, when Cordero served as the head of the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx, he observed that when crime rates fell, community members didn’t always feel safer. That’s because often their concerns were hyper-local. “The homicide rate is what the nation watches, but residents may be more focused on the drug dealers on the corner that their kids have to walk by,” says Cordero. “It’s still the zombie apocalypse in downtown Camden on a Saturday,” says Pastor Merrill referring to the city’s drug addicts, but the narcotics trade has mostly moved indoors.
It’s hard to imagine a civilian executive having this much power over hiring and promotion, and training without those reforms.
Those reforms allowed Camden to address your other concern – collateral damage and excessive police violence – in a serious and meaningful way:
While many departments define “reasonable” force in the line of duty vaguely, Camden’s definition is much clearer. The department adopted an 18-page use-of-force policy in 2019, developed with New York University’s Policing Project. The rules emphasize that de-escalation has to come first. Deadly force—such as a chokehold or firing a gun—can only be used in certain situations, once every other tactic has been exhausted. “It requires that force is not only reasonable and necessary, but that it’s proportionate,” says Farhang Heydari, executive director of the Policing Project. Most important, “they’re requirements. They’re not suggestions.”
An officer who sees a colleague violating the edict must intervene; the department can fire any officer it finds acted out of line. By the department’s account, reports of excessive force complaints in Camden have dropped 95% since 2014.
That changed policy has had real effects:
It was just after 8 p.m., when a knife-wielding man staggered out of a fast-food shop and zigzagged down Broadway in downtown Camden, N.J. More than a dozen officers — rookies with three months on the job and veterans with 13 years — formed a ring around him. When he stumbled back, slashing the carving knife unpredictably and ignoring orders to drop the weapon, the police kept their firearms holstered.
In less than 10 minutes, the man had let go of the knife and officers handcuffed him.
Similar scenarios have resulted in fatal shootings, often of unarmed people, but using time, distance and communication, the Camden Police Department de-escalated the potentially deadly situation.
“If we approached that night with the old-guard mentality, we would have had an officer-involved fatal shooting,” Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson said of the November 2015 night.
On Wednesday, the department released its new policy, codifying what has been department practice for years. Experts are calling the document — drafted with members of New York University Law School’s Policing Project and vetted by both the New Jersey ACLU and the Fraternal Order of Police — the “most progressive” use-of-force policy to date.
Since 2015, under Thomson’s stewardship, the Camden Police Department has adopted use-of-force training and procedures that promote de-escalation and make clear that force is a last resort.
An armed man in mental health crisis, who moments earlier had threatened restaurant customers, would justify an officer’s use of deadly force, Thomson told The Washington Post on Tuesday. It would have fallen in the “lawful but awful” category — a preventable encounter that would have nonetheless met the legal requirements to be classified a noncriminal shooting.
“We would have walked with him for another mile,” Thomson said. “If there’s something else [police] can do to avoid taking that person’s life, there should be an obligation on us to exercise those options.”
The 18-page directive, which boils down to six core principles, limits use of force to a narrow list of situations. Even then, the document says that the “use of force should never be considered routine” — never to be used unless it’s necessary and even then, it must be proportional to the circumstances. Once the situation is under control, officers must “promptly provide or request medical aid.”
The policy also places an affirmative duty on department employees to stop other officers from using improper force; members will be disciplined for their own violations or failing to report a fellow officer’s.
“Much like a doctor’s Hippocratic oath, police must first do no harm,” Thomson told The Post.
The expectation of de-escalation is not just from the chief, he said, but from each other. When there’s a deadly encounter, it’s deadly on both sides. The more officers can slow things down, the more they can reduce the need for force.
Since disbanding and rebuilding the police force in 2013, [Thomson] said, the department has established legitimacy with a style of policing rooted in respect, dignity and accountability.
“We make far fewer mistakes or egregious acts, but are still far from perfect,” he said. “When we do stumble, people know we will not tolerate inappropriate or illegal police behavior and will hold ourselves accountable.”
Last September, Thomson reached out to ACLU senior supervising attorney Alexander Shalom and asked if he’d be willing to review a draft of the policy.
“There were parts of it that really knocked my socks off. It wasn’t high-in-the-sky with everyone singing ‘Kumbaya,‘” Shalom told The Post. Of note, he said, were how “accessible,” and “common-sensical” it was.
The chief also consulted Camden’s Fraternal Order of Police leadership. Though it’s rare to have a policy vetted by the local ACLU and police union, both supported the policy.
It’s also hard to imagine it doing the other component of this strategy – a more lightweight, but more substantial police force – without them:
The Camden County Police Department rehired most of the laid-off cops, along with nearly 100 other officers, but at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city.
There is one very noticeable difference in Whitman Park over the past year: the number of cops on the street. Thanks to the reorganized force, there are now far more officers throughout Camden – walking their beat in tandem, talking with residents, driving patrol cars.
By laying off the officers and rehiring them as county employees, Camden was able to slash officer pay and cut benefits roughly in half. In all, average per officer costs were trimmed from $182,168 to $99,605, according to county figures.
With those savings, the department, which has since unionized, hired scores of new officers while keeping overall costs about the same. An analysis of police employment data indicates that in the course of a year, Camden has gone from a bare-bones force to having at or near the highest police presence of any larger U.S. city on a per capita basis. By the time the force is fully staffed, which the county expects will be later this summer, Camden will have 411 full-time sworn officers, or about 53 for every 10,000 residents. Cities of populations exceeding 50,000 employed an average of 17 officers per 10,000 residents in the most recent 2012 data reported to the FBI. Only Washington, D.C., recorded a higher tally that year – about 61 officers per 10,000 residents – than Camden will once its new force is fully up and running.
And the Camden police have done it while doing more to protect this marginalized community from violence and death:
After a particularly deadly year in 1995, Camden’s Cathedral of Immaculate Conception began illuminating one candle for each homicide victim. In 2012, the year ended with 67 candles—a rate of about 87 murders per 100,000 residents, which ranked Camden fifth nationwide.
But on New Year’s 2018, just 22 candles were lit: The city’s murder rate fell to its lowest since 1987. The number of annual killings has been in decline since 2012; so have robberies, aggravated assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, and non-fatal shooting incidents.
[Scott Thomson, Camden’s chief of police] led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
There’s more than one kind of excessive violence in the world. Camden’s reforms addressed all of them.
