In 2004 and 2005, when Camden was named the nation's "Most Dangerous City" by a publishing firm ranking crime statistics, local law-enforcement and elected officials said resoundingly that the beleaguered city, also one of the nation's poorest, couldn't arrest its way off the list.
Now, as Camden is poised to reclaim the dubious title of America's "Most Dangerous City" based on 2008 crime statistics, the city's Police Department is arguing that its officers and their handcuffs are making a difference this year.
"Law enforcement has been plagued with a philosophy that there's not much you can do about crime," said Camden Police Inspector Mike Lynch during a recent interview. "Socio-economic issues that are plaguing the city of Camden are and always will have an impact on crime. There's nothing we can do to influence that part of it."
But he says the Department is making a difference in the only way it can.
As the Washington-based CQ Press prepares to release its 2009 list of America's safest and most dangerous cities with populations of 75,000 or greater, Lynch said Camden is experiencing a 14 percent reduction in overall crime from the previous year, including large drops in homicides, shootings, burglaries and motor vehicle theft.
Critics of the rankings, including the FBI, have blasted CQ Press' practice of molding crime statistics into a list devoid of analysis, a process that typecasts every corner of a city.
"The problem is, you won't learn much from it," said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist with the University of Missouri in St. Louis and president of the American Society of Criminology. "It simply states that you're at a greater risk for crime within the city limits, but it lists none of the factors. It's absolutely not detailed enough."
Law-enforcement officials in Camden tie most of the violent crime in the city specifically to the drug market and to the criminals and gangs who use illegal weapons to enforce it. According to the rankings, an individual in Camden would have a greater likelihood of being a victim of crime than they would in other cities, but Rosenfeld said the rankings don't specify what areas and what activities in the city are more likely to result in a crime, such as going to buy or to sell illegal drugs.
"We've never even had any cars broken into," said Adam Lorber, the team's general manager.
When Camden was ranked second on CQ Press' list last November, elected and law-enforcement officials knew this year's rankings could be worse.
"We can see it coming, so it's never a punch in the face," said Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk. "We see the crimes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis."
There were 11 homicides in Camden during the first month of 2008, an early, unprecedented preview of how homicide numbers can shift and topple an entire year, Faulk said. By the time the CQ Press rankings came out last November, Camden had already exceeded the previous year's total number of homicides and was nearly on pace to break its record of 60 set in 1995.
Camden ultimately ended 2008 with 55 homicides. Despite the large drop from that near-record number in 2008, Camden's 31 homicides so far this year are on pace to match or eclipse homicide numbers from 2005 and 2006.
At the Camden Police Department, which Chief Scott Thomson took over in July 2008, the administration's policy of directing patrols and shifts in areas of greater crime has resulted in 25 percent more arrests in 2009 than this time last year, Lynch said. The directed-patrol policy, which critics have said is nothing less than a quota, holds officers "accountable" for crimes great and small, whether it's someone urinating in public or an ex-convict selling crack cocaine, Lynch said.
Officers on directed patrols are expected to "get out and engage" the people of Camden, a tactic Lynch called a contrast to a "reactive," radio-driven approach to policing.
"We're trying to make it less comfortable to be a criminal in Camden these days," he said.
Although shootings are down, aggravated assaults have been one of the few crimes that have risen, up 19 percent from this time last year.
Camden's overhaul of an understaffed police department has required large amounts of overtime from officers along with "a whole new way of thinking," Lynch acknowledged, but he said the city was expected to receive a much-needed influx of 75 new officers in the next year.
Still, the new approach to fighting crime is not without its critics.
John Williamson, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1, said the forced overtime and canceled lunch breaks associated with the directed patrols are rotting the Department from the bottom up.
"The patrol division is getting hammered," he said, adding that some officers are working 16-hour days. "Your police administration should not be sending its officers to divorce court and the hospital for stress."
City Councilman Gilbert "Whip" Wilson, a former police officer, said the complaints he's heard from officers has him thinking Thomson's regime is a "reign of terror."
"When you have wives coming up to city-council meetings to complain about how their husbands are being treated, you have issues," Wilson said.
Lynch said the results are hard to argue with in 2009.
"Anytime you have the level of change we're experiencing here, you're going to have peaks and valleys, and folks who are resistant to change," he said. "We are seeing results."
Camden has seen positive results in the past however, only to see one bloody month or some new proliferation of gangs or illegal handguns change the statistics and, more importantly, change how residents feel about their city.
Just a few blocks from where families watch baseball on the Delaware River and students toil away in a law library, William Cruz, owner of Sasha's Mini Market at 4th and York streets, says he's been closing earlier recently because of two robberies at his store this year.
"It's the same corners, the same people, the same killers," said Cruz. "Nothing has changed."
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