The new Camden County Police Metro Division took over patrol of the city of Camden about three months ago and officials are reporting major progress in making the city streets safer. Chief Scott Thomson told NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider that community policing has led to a great reduction in daytime homicides and daytime shootings.
“The public safety successes that we’ve had thus far are as attributable to good old fashioned police work as it is to the community that’s helping us to secure these neighborhoods,” Thomson said. “One of the mandates that we have had for our officers with the indoctrination into this new organization, is as a community policing philosophy is underpinned by cops that are walking the beat, talking to people that live in the neighborhoods, establishing relationships and building the trust and legitimacy with them wherein that they’re the ones that are providing information to us.”
Thomson said gun seizures are up 74 percent over this time last year, daytime homicides are down 91 percent and daytime shootings have been reduced 44 percent.
According to Thomson, the vast majority of gun seizures are coming from interactions with criminals in car stops and also from residents who are providing police with information about people who they know are in possession of firearms. “Our officers are responding to the calls for service and we’re investigating and we’re engaging these folks and we’re detecting them and seizing the guns,” he explained.
One of the frustrations of law enforcement, Thomson said, is dealing with repeat offenders and the “revolving doors of the justice system.” But he said the new approach will help make the area safer.
“The bad folks are pretty well known to us and they’re even more well known to the people who live in these communities. And that’s where our community policing is really helping us in our efforts,” he said. “We need to have that conduit of information flowing back and forth so that we can spend our time and the majority of our engagements with the bad people and removing them from the street and making an environment where when you drive through sections of our city that were once plagued with open air drug markets, you can actually see children riding bicycles and folks sitting on their front steps enjoying their neighbors.”
Sometimes residents resent new police coming to their communities, but Thomson said that’s not the case in Camden. He explained that even before officers were hired, officials asked for community input. “We did focus groups with the community to ensure that the traits of what they wanted within their police officers is what we were acquiring as members of our organization. And when we hire our officers and we deploy them into the neighborhoods, it’s done so with a philosophy of engagement to the people that live there,” he said.
Thomson said so far, the greatest successes of the department have come from providing a sense of security to people living in the neighborhoods.
“When they leave their front door and come to their front steps and even out to the sidewalks, there gets to be a tipping point where there gets to be more good people on the street than there are bad people on the street. And that’s evidenced by the suppression of the flagrant open air drug markets in the communities in which we’ve been able to do this. And particularly the suppression of flagrant daytime crime,” Thomson said.