A man running with a knife in Hand in a fast-food restaurant. When he comes out again, surround him with some police officers. You talk to the man, run a few meters next to him, ask him to drop the knife. Finally they overwhelm him. “Eighteen months ago we would have shot the guy and killed him, two steps from the Store out,” said Scott Thomson, the Video from the year 2015 according to the magazine “Politico”.
Thomson was chief of police of Camden, New Jersey, when the city was abolished in the year of 2013, your police authority. And he was also head of the new police, which should in the future be used by the district monitors. Because the city wanted to at the time dismissed all police officers and a new model of the fight against crime to develop, it is now back in the headlines. In search of a model for police reform activists, and politicians look to New Jersey. After police officer Derek Chauvin killed the African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis, they didn’t stop hundreds of thousands of Americans to demonstrate for reforms and against racism. And the city Council of Minneapolis, announced the police in their current Form to abolish.
In its place a better order to come to power. So many people introduced themselves seven years ago, also in Camden. The city, which is only separated by the Delaware river from Philadelphia, did, on the surface, the demands of many activists. They abolished the old police authority. Chris Christie, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey, was one of the supporters of the project. “You had to the principles of the training of police officers and the culture of the police change authority,” he told “Politico”.
From warrior to protector
This is a success because you have started from the beginning. Thomson, the retired chief of police, said the police was now in the role of “protectors”. The President Barack Obama established the police reform Taskforce had recommended a change from “warrior” to a “protector” in the self-image of police officers. A visit to Obama’s in Camden in the year 2015 should seal the deal for this transformation.
That even a conservative politician such as Christie’s did not get a lot of value in the former police of Camden saw had to do with the up to date results achieved. Earlier, the statistician compared the murder rate of Camden with the help of Honduras in the year 2012, 67 people were killed. The 77,000 inhabitants in the city, was considered one of the most dangerous in the country. The structural change had resulted in the former industrial city to a high level of unemployment, widespread poverty and a destroyed city. Camden was one of the many places in America where since the middle of the twentieth century, to the influx of African Americans from the South and the beginning of the end of De-industrialization, the “White Flight” to the suburbs ensued.
The majority of White way
White, who could afford and wanted to accept integrated schools, left the inner cities, where a large part of their tax revenue and jobs lost. Only six percent of Camden’s population are “non-Hispanic White”. Around 49 percent of Latinos, 41 percent of African-Americans. Critics note that the police was still almost half White.
In 2010, lived for almost 40 percent of the people in Camden live below the poverty and there were 3000 empty, decaying buildings. According to the authorities, 175 drug-handling facilities found at that time in the city and most of the dealers had not come from Camden, but the dilapidated roads would be used only for your business. As in many other American cities, many people the police are no longer trusted, because the police were inefficient and corrupt. In 2010, the municipality was managed down so that you had a budget deficit of $ 14 million, and half of the police officers had to be dismissed.
