This May Be a New Model for Community Policing
Camden, New Jersey's police officers are trained to be 'guardians, not warriors.'
A Camden, New Jersey, police officer talks with a neighborhood child. (Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
May 19, 2015· 2 MIN READ
Harry Bruinius is The Christian Science Monitor's staff writer in New York, covering politics and regional issues.
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In 2012, crime was so bad and money so tight in Camden, New Jersey, that city officials decided to take dramatic steps to scrap its 141-year-old unionized police department and replace it with a county-based force, one that focused more on putting cops on the street and building better relations with the residents they serve.
President Obama on Monday hailed the nascent Camden County Police Department as a national success story, a model for other departments to emulate as cities across the country continue to grapple with increasingly stormy relations between cops and the minority neighborhoods they police.
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“Just a few years ago, this city was written off as dangerous beyond redemption, a city trapped in a downward spiral,” the president said at a community center in Camden. “Parents were afraid to let their children play outside, drug dealers operated in broad daylight, there weren’t enough cops to patrol the streets, so two years ago the police department was overhauled to implement a new model of community policing.”
The community policing idea has been around for decades, but in the aftermath of police shootings and the deaths of black men in police custody in cities across the U.S.—many of them captured on video—political leaders and police officials are beginning to refocus attention on such methods as they attempt to reestablish trust in their communities.
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