How a new kind of policing saved America’s most dangerous city (opinion)

We can build a better, more equitable and accountable system of justice in our country. We can change American policing. I am certain of this because I have seen it happen.

During my first ride-along observing the workday of Camden’s patrol officers, I saw many things: a child who should have been sitting in a schoolroom selling drugs in broad daylight; abandoned buildings, and parks and playgrounds that were completely empty, devoid of any life; and all around me, faces of residents in the community that met mine with despair and distrust as we drove through the streets in an unmarked police car.

The one thing that I did not see that day was a single police officer on the streets of Camden. Sirens wailed in the background, and a police cruiser flew by on the highway with lights and sirens blaring. But on the streets of the most dangerous city in America there was not a single police officer in sight.

My team and I tried to understand what was happening. We went to a CompStat meeting, where we expected to see senior police leaders using statistics on crimes and officer deployments to make the city safer. Instead, we saw senior officer after senior officer stand up and say, “last week we had a shooting here,” and point to a spot on the city map. Or “last week we had a robbery.” And each time they finished they put a yellow sticky note on the wall where the crime had occurred, saying “no leads.” At the end of more than two hours, we had a map filled with yellow sticky notes and no idea of how to stop the bloodshed.

We had a police department that had no idea of what it was doing or whether it could do better. It lurched wildly from 911 call to 911 call, sometimes taking hours to respond to calls of serious violence. It failed to solve serious crimes — rapes, robberies, murders — that plagued the city, and yet hundreds of arrests were being made for low-level crimes, driven most often by drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, poverty and homelessness. This created a never-ending cycle of arrest and incarceration that left the once-great city torn apart and did nothing to stop the horrific violence.

The department was operating at that time under a failed, old-school approach to policing. Anecdotes of prior arrests and crimes became the basis for decisions about how to run the department. The department did not collect or use data. Instead, it operated solely upon the “gut” and “hunches” of its leadership, which were most often wrong. It lacked formal systems and processes to ensure they were acting fairly and with integrity toward members of the community.

This horrific, unthinkable violence drove me and my senior leadership team to conclude that the police department had to be completely reinvented, with two core operating pillars necessary to create a foundation from which a better police force, and better city, could emerge.

The first pillar was accountability. We began to hold ourselves accountable — both within the department and to the community we served.

In the summer of 2008, just one year after me and my team started, we changed the way we policed the city. We took officers out from behind desks and put them on the street. We changed the way we dispatched officers to answer 911 calls. We demoted officers who did not show the integrity needed to inspire the trust of those they were sworn to protect. We fired others who broke the rules. We dismantled specialty units that worked as overtime machines to pad the salaries of a handful of officers. We instituted new ways to track compliance with rules and discipline. And, we leveraged the existing suspension of civil service rules to promote a young, innovative deputy chief, Scott Thomson, to be the interim police chief. Chief Thomson had only 14 years on the job and, in most other police departments in America, would not have been eligible for the position. We didn’t care. He was the right person for the job.

None of this was easy. We pulled data from handwritten files locked away in old filing cabinets to understand what was happening. We designed a new 911 system and built a CompStat model, at first by hand. We secured funding to build critical technology within the department, which would allow us to collect information in real-time to hold ourselves accountable.

And we pushed back against all the political efforts, inside and outside the department, that were fighting to maintain the old status quo. We made many enemies and made very few friends.

Because tinkering around the edges would fail, we rebuilt the Camden Police Department from the ground up.

And it worked.

This didn’t take decades. It took a year of unwavering dedication to a difficult task by a lot of good and decent people who were as fed up then as so many people around the country are today.

Before I left office in 2010, we returned the police department to the city of Camden, and I formally tapped Scott Thomson to serve as Chief of Police.

The one thing that was very different three years later was that Camden residents had seen a new model of policing, where public safety, accountability, and community went hand in hand. They knew what was possible, and they wanted it back.

From the ashes of hard-fought reforms, a new, stronger police department emerged. Out went the failed contracts, which restrained the ability of the leadership to hold officers accountable and limited how the department could be staffed and run. In came data and technology systems that we had built to track progress and measure results. Perhaps most importantly, this new department doubled the number of police officers — officers hired with an eye toward the future, rather than the past.

After a short detour, the change we began in 2008 became the foundation for a new, better police department.

Chief Thomson led the department until 2019 with the mantra that the police are guardians, not warriors. Today, more than a decade after we began our reform efforts, Camden’s guardians have made the city the safest that it has been in more than 50 years. It is a model agency for community policing, violence and crime reduction, use of force policies, and, above all, for accountability.

This is not to say that every single police department in America must disband, or that a new model of equitable public safety can only be achieved if built from the ground up. But for many cities and towns, building a new public safety department from scratch will be the right choice. If culture, contracts, and funding impede true reform, communities will have no choice but to build anew. Communities should never have to choose between public safety and equity, and they do not have to.

And I would have been wrong.