Transforming Policing in Camden

The change in the culture is really the shift from a warrior mentality to that of a guardian and a community builder. The solution to our problems in our most challenged communities does not lie in a pistol and a pair of handcuffs. Describe the Camden story. You have to understand the people. Camden, yeah, we're tough. We're tough people. We're strong. We present ourselves as being hard, but we're social people. I remember growing up in the early 70s, people walking out their houses to go to Campbell's Soup, General Electric, RCA, you know, men and women earning a living wage. We call this the city it goes, right next to Phil, three hours from New York. I've always loved camping. It's our city. It was a beautiful place. And then... They say Camden is the city that hope forgot. The poorest city in the nation and the most dangerous city all in the same place. We're nine square miles and at one point in time we had about 175 open-air drug markets. Our per capita income is less than $13,000 a year here. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana, in some regards have become the economy. Without that highway, suburbanites wouldn't come up here. They stop right here, turn right back around, go back on the highway. The opportunity for kids to see bodies in the street before school, after school, family members being the victim of violent crimes was the norm. And many neighborhoods, you know, were left almost to fend for themselves. Our kids couldn't even play outside. It was like as if the, you know, the drug dealers had taken over. A mother had lost her son and she challenged me as the police chief and said, what are you doing to make sure that I don't have to bury my next son? That right there was the line in the sand moment for me. Camden's my hometown, it's where my roots are. I wanted to try to make people's lives better. I worked narcotics in the city for almost a decade. I locked up drug dealers. I did a great job. But at no point in time did we ever ask the question, well, they're still out there selling drugs. What we're doing isn't working. Why are we continuing to do it? When are we going to change the metrics of success as a police department and as policing individuals? By the time I became the police chief in 2008, I was the sixth leader in five years. So I had seen an organization start to really devolve from the inside out. A negative culture had embedded itself, rooted in apathy, lethargy, and even corruption in some aspects. It had gotten to be a department where you could be the best cop in the world or the worst cop in the world. There wasn't a standard. This is where I grew up. I can remember I was a junior in high school. I was out with my friends and three gunmen with masks on jumped out of the car. And I can remember the guy having a gun to my chest and no one did anything. No one called the cops. They just let it go. I go home, I'm talking to my dad and I'm telling him it's not even worth calling the cops. You're not going to catch him. My dad sat me down. You can sit here and you can complain about the system or you can get into the organization and become a solution. When I first took over as chief, we had probably close to 100 people that were working Monday through Friday in administrative assignments. We transferred these people to work the streets, nights and weekends, when crimes occurring and where crimes occurring. This was not very well accepted. Why did you sign up for this livelihood? Certainly wasn't for the stock options. If you don't want to protect people, then don't be a police officer. Criminal Element started to operate with a sense of impunity. In 2012, we saw our crime rate in the city exceed that of third world countries. There was nights on a Saturday or Friday night where we had three cops from the entire city. You could get the heck beat out of you just walking around the corner. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I was committed to try something different, to do something that had never been done in New Jersey before. The entire Camden City Police Department will be dismantled, replaced with a countywide force. The Metro Division will have an additional 130 officers. We will be proud when Camden is no longer in the top five of the most dangerous cities in America. It's not a popular decision, but it really, truly was the right thing to do for the people in this city, and we did it. We dedicated our lives to this city, and now we feel betrayed. Every member of the city police department was essentially laid off, including myself. We get a letter in the mail asking if we want to go to Camden County Metro. And I'll be honest, my first thought was, no. I was right back to that 17-year-old boy. I was pissed off. And I was angry. I started to actually lose faith in the system. And I wondered, what were the people in charge thinking? And then I had to think, if I leave and don't show them the right way to do it, then I'm just as bad as the drug dealers. Seldom in life do you ever get the opportunity to hit the reset button. I really didn't care about your past. I didn't care about your gripes, your grievances. I told the officers in the neighborhoods, I don't measure the number of arrests you make and I don't care how many tickets you write. We want you to build relationships. What I want to see are people sitting on their front steps and children riding their bicycles. Generally the only time we ever knocked on somebody's door it was when bad things were occurring. It was either A moment of crisis or a moment of enforcement. But when people saw that we were there to help, when they saw that we would be in that neighborhood with a greater level of frequency than the drug dealer who was standing on the corner, people welcomed that. We started giving the community back its neighborhoods strategically. Princes and Wildwood was one of our most dangerous corners in the city. We made it one of our safest areas just by presence. Of course we had to lock a couple people up, but... Once we did, we stayed there. Hello, how are you doing today, sir? People actually were speaking to us and I would ride around on a bike with the officers and they would clap, give us standing ovations as we rode down their blocks. It was amazing. It was a two-part process, but once we do our job, we had city workers come in. and tear down the abandoned buildings that were used for drug activity and prostitution. So it's given them hope again. By getting the critical mass of people leaving their homes and occupying public space, we could slowly withdraw. Because now that the people were able to secure it themselves, we didn't have to be there 24-7 anymore. If somebody tries to come back, they're quick to get on the phone and say, listen, these guys are back. We need you and we're there for you. When I was younger they used to walk the beat and they're back to doing that now. Everywhere you go you see them. There's a lot less drug activity and a lot less crime going on. I went to jail for 10 years. I was released from prison February 13, 2013. When they changed the police force, order returned because you don't have the cop throwing the little boy against the wall taking the money. He starts seeing the cops presence, the cop walking the beat. He's not worrying about what you used to do because they had a strategy. I got to know him and he's a very intelligent guy, a guy that really cared about the city, but he was dealt a tough... So I reached out to him. I heard he got out of prison. The offer was to help him not lock up 14, 12-year-old little boys, and he had a project called Guardian. What we seen in Camden is, like, third of our violent crime was by kids. You can't arrest your way out of the problem. Deputy Chief Wysocki came to our office and he said, I would really love to do something with the younger kids that are getting in trouble in the city. We met with 40 and 50 youth who have already had contact with the police. department who might be in their beginning of gang involvement, who might be just getting on the wrong path and not going to school. And we talked to them about what a difference their life could be if they made different choices. And we offered social services, especially to their parents, because a lot of moms say, I didn't know I had somebody who would help me. I didn't know where to turn. And they came to it more clearly. Places they can't reach, I can reach. Which school y'all go to? Which one? Which one you go to? As soon as he said, Mark, I don't want to lock these kids up. You know, if we talk to them, maybe we can spin them around. I thought to myself, If somebody would have talked to me at that age, I would have spun around and says, look, I got to give myself a chance. Y'all going to book it, okay? We'll talk to you soon, okay? All right. Take it easy, puppy. All right, you too, little shorty. I tore it up. I should be able to help them put it back together. We hear like so much on the news and stuff about police brutality and them hurting the youth. And now you see them out here helping the youth, interacting with them. It's like you have this opportunity to change the generation. Because not all cops are bad cops. Having fun? I'm an officer, huh? Oh, man. You outrank me now. I'll switch that one up. I work with a group called River Primus. We get kids off the street, we bring them into camp, have classes, kind of distract them of like what's going on from the outside. Maybe I need to be taller. Or older. He doing it? Keep going. Don't give up. You got it. You got it. Keep going. My thoughts on the police are like, they can bond with the little kids, but we're the most dangerous thing to them. Like, teens are very not cool to the police. The police should be someone who we feel like make us think. but they aren't. Instead, when we see a police officer, we think to go the opposite way. Their attitude, the way they present themselves, it's like terrifying. It's good if you try to talk to the local people, don't have them feeling like you're so... oh, I'm a cop, I might just take you down for any reason whatsoever, you know. Hold a conversation or take a stroll with a pedestrian. Once you do that, you slowly but surely gain the trust of the community. And, you know, when people are walking by you, they just might, hey, Officer Brown, or hey, Officer Cortez. All right, man, bag me. Nice to meet you. All right, man? Please, bag me. Have a nice day. Attention roll call. At ease. Bowman. Sir. You'll be 952 with Hunter. You'll be in Guardian Zone 1, walking slash mobile. If you're looking to change a culture from within, you have to first teach the officers the way that you want them to act, and then you have to sustain that training over time. There are some groups that have an inherent distrust of us based on our history, right? So if they're already distrustful of us and now we're standing there with our hand on our gun, it sends a message to them that we are maybe aggressive. What do they see when they see us coming? is a big deal. We're going to talk about how to identify bias in your direct reports. You may not know you have a bias and now after taking this class you have signs to look for and say, okay, all right, listen, maybe am I handling this a little bit differently? Would everybody agree in here that a sergeant is the most influential person on an officer out there? You're going to come back and they're like, hey, boss, I got to go to this fair and impartial policing training. You know, how was it? Your response at that moment is going to have a lot of impact on that officer and the way that they perceive the training. Part of the reason for being a leader is you have to be able to step back from your position and say, okay, what do I need to do better? Which in turn is going to trickle down to my officers. I've always believed that as a police officer or as a military soldier, I have to be held to a hundred percent. higher standard because I have the ability to take away your rights and liberties. We have to put them in scenario-based training that gets them not necessarily going immediately to their firearm if that can be avoided. If the only person that you're dealing with is armed with a bat or armed with a knife, take a step back, begin to communicate. Drop the knife. Sir, drop the knife. I think that we can avoid some of the deadly force encounters that have happened in recent time. Our job is not jury and executioner. Our job is just to bring peace to the situation and let the system handle it. You are given an enormous amount of authority and power with that badge that sits upon your chest. You are the only entity of government that is authorized to utilize deadly force upon its citizenry. That is a tremendous, a tremendous amount of authority. And it's something that we have to ensure that when it comes the time that we have to do that, that we have exhausted every other option. This is about a culture of de-escalation, not just training in de-escalation. Culture is a shared set of values or beliefs. Culture is not a rule, it's the standard of which we hold each other to. The reason why people call the police is because they're in the worst time of their life and at that time we're the only ones that can help them resolve that problem. You just stay away from me. Great, we're here to help you. Remember, keep your tactical L. No. Stay away from me. You want your gun out. I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want to kill myself so just stay away. Listen, you don't want to do that. Remember, keep distance away. Distance and stay behind cover. Cabrinha, if you just put the knife down. All right, find out what the problem is. Remember, you gotta try and fix it. He doesn't understand. You don't understand. Nobody understands. Nobody cares. We do. And that's why we're here. Tell me what your problems are. Tell me. He made me take medicine and then it makes me see things and I don't wanna take it anymore. So that's why I drink. Slow it down and take a step back and you talk. And that changes everything. Empathy is key. Honestly, I truly do believe it works. You can't. Negotiate with anybody if your weapon's down range at them like that. That's all a person sees. You can't just have all brawn and no brain and no morals. The mental side of the training, it reduces that gray area. It makes you stop and gives you that second to think to make that right decision. We're here, you're on 27. Turn off the high speed right now. We're responding to a call for a 96. That's 10 code for a mentally disturbed person. You didn't take anything? No. No? OK. Are you on any type of medication? All right. I know. Listen, don't get overwhelmed. My main concern is that you're OK, OK? Because they told us that you were stressed out. You were walking through the street, a little bit incoherent. We need to make sure you look. Where were you working at? You're so upset. No, it's just issues. I mean, kids, that's it. I mean, frustration. Listen, this is what we're going through, okay? Because I need to make sure you're going to be okay after I finish talking to you, okay? We have EMS coming up. They're going to talk to you. They might be able to refer you to any other place that you might want to go to. No, I'm not going to go there. Do me a favor. Take your hands out of your pocket. Put your hands right here where I can see you. We're just offering you services to make sure you're good. Okay. Everybody stresses. Take it one day at a time. Take a deep breath. Okay? Right now, I just want you to relax. Respect goes a long way because that would de-escalate a situation a great deal. You treat them like human beings. When you put yourself in somebody else's shoes, they can read that. When you have somebody who is mentally challenged or on a narcotic, that's one of the most dangerous situations an officer will ever be in because you're not dealing with a rational person. With her ver- skills she was able to defuse the situation, keep him calm until paramedics arrived. Our main priority is to get him help and resolve the situation without having to use force. And she did a really good job. I come from an old police background and I mean I was in SWAT, TAC force. I lived for action. I wanted to kick in doors, chase bad guys. If you'd have talked to me four years ago when I'm riding in the back of a SWAT truck about to hit a door and told me that a walking beat and a couple of bicycle units could clean up the city, I would have had a few choice words for you. But, it did. The chief's plan is working. I think that many of us in law enforcement and justice post Ferguson and post Gardner in New York City unfortunately became very optically focused on the facts of the incident in and of itself. If you really listen to the people what they were talking about were the perceived inequities on thousands and thousands of occasions that occurred prior to that and the incident just basically served as a flashpoint. When I allowed myself to really hear what was being said out there I think there is a tremendous amount of validity in it. There needs to be dialogue with the people in my community, and these don't need to take place in town hall settings. He got off his butt and came into the community, and he made himself known at various businesses, and I give him credit for that. It should have been done in the 40s. People of color have always been victimized. It's time for rebirth, and you see it happening. But look what it took to get to this point. So where do we go next? Really connecting with the community, connecting with anybody. It starts with empathy. You know, it wasn't but 40 years ago we had incidents in Selma, Alabama at the foot of Edmund Pettus Bridge. None of us were standing there and did the things that were done that day. And we may not be responsible for it, but we're responsible to it as an organization, as an institution. And that those memories are still very fresh in people's minds. And that's what this uniform sometimes represents. And the only way we're going to be able to change that experience and that opinion is to offer new experiences, to shape new opinions. And that can only be done through human contact. And that's why baseball, you know, it's America's game. But I think we as Americans are actually a certain subset of African-American or Latinos in communities like Camden have opted out of our citizenship and our right. So anything near you, you go get it, right? Anything. Go. You know, I was born and raised in this neighborhood. Baseball was gone for almost 15 years. We dig the hole, we dig out the hole. The game ain't over. How do we feel? Good! Good! So when I looked at 15-year-olds and their lifetime, they had never seen a baseball game in their neighborhood. So when we formed the league, it was to make sure that as many kids that wanted to play could play. This league challenged men and women that were engaged in drug dealing and drug use to consider our parks as a place not for that type of activity. And at the same time we invited them if they had children, little brothers, little sisters, cousins, to bring them back to the park because even the worst of us have moments of sanity and clarity when we wish the best for someone else. So why not capitalize on that common ground and see if we could build from that. When we look nationally at crime sh**, stats. The rising segment of violent offenders are youth between the ages of 12 and 16 and we in the league believe that baseball can help fix that. It may sound simple but we believe the rules of engagement and how you play, how you resolve disputes isn't based on one person's interpretations like we all have a say and that's how we help develop a sense of democracy. When there's a level of trust, not just with the police department, but with our neighbors, it creates community. When we see each other on the street, people say hello. It's like a normal neighborhood again. So it's not just that they're present, that the cars are driving. around, they'll introduce themselves, they'll play with the kids, they'll talk to the teachers. They're much more willing to engage with people and then therefore I think the people in the neighborhood are willing to engage back with them. We're only as good as our community allows us to be. Without them making a phone call, without them talking to the walk and beat officer, we can't be an effective police department. I've been dealing with the juvenile population in the city for a really, really long time, and I've heard parents tell their kids, don't talk to the cops, they're the enemy. This is a seismic shift within the past three years that this event occurred and the kids are actually running towards the police. So it's hugely important, especially because our city is so young. Our juvenile population is almost half the population of Camden. When I was 17, I became an EMT and then I plan on going back to college and just, you know, work from there. What's up, guy? You know you got some mustard right here. We do have a long way to go. We still have problems with poverty and crime. There's still, you know, drugs being sold. But as far as the way that it was three years ago, it's a huge improvement. There's not a finish line here. No matter how great our reductions are in crime statistics, the people that live in my community, they judge their safety as whether or not they can walk to the corner store or whether their child can ride the bicycle outside of their home. And it was refreshing and amazing to see people that were extremely disgruntled and very suspect in whether they were going to apply for the new organization are now some of my senior commanders. We're out here. We're. Interacting with the community, but what's actually helping the city too is that the state is putting efforts into revitalizing Camden. The city is coming alive. I was at a point where I was about to move, and I'm content to stay. If they hadn't made that change, I probably would have been out of here, but I'm staying. I'm happy, and if it keeps on going the way it's going, then my kids will probably stay here too. Everybody wants to know what is community policing. What it really boils down to is that it is about treating people with respect and dignity and making the lives of the people of the city better.

Camden, yeah, we're tough. We're tough people. We're strong.

We present ourselves as being hard, but we're social people. I remember growing up in the early 70s, people walking out their houses to go to Campbell's Soup, General Electric, RCA, you know, men and women earning a living wage. We call this the city it goes, right next to Phil, three hours from New York. I've always loved camping.

It's our city. It was a beautiful place. And then... They say Camden is the city that hope forgot.

The poorest city in the nation and the most dangerous city all in the same place. We're nine square miles and at one point in time we had about 175 open-air drug markets. Our per capita income is less than $13,000 a year here. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana, in some regards have become the economy.

Without that highway, suburbanites wouldn't come up here. They stop right here, turn right back around, go back on the highway. The opportunity for kids to see bodies in the street before school, after school, family members being the victim of violent crimes was the norm. And many neighborhoods, you know, were left almost to fend for themselves.

Our kids couldn't even play outside. It was like as if the, you know, the drug dealers had taken over. A mother had lost her son and she challenged me as the police chief and said, what are you doing to make sure that I don't have to bury my next son?

That right there was the line in the sand moment for me. Camden's my hometown, it's where my roots are. I wanted to try to make people's lives better. I worked narcotics in the city for almost a decade. I locked up drug dealers.

I did a great job. But at no point in time did we ever ask the question, well, they're still out there selling drugs. What we're doing isn't working.

Why are we continuing to do it? When are we going to change the metrics of success as a police department and as policing individuals? By the time I became the police chief in 2008, I was the sixth leader in five years. So I had seen an organization start to really devolve from the inside out.

A negative culture had embedded itself, rooted in apathy, lethargy, and even corruption in some aspects. It had gotten to be a department where you could be the best cop in the world or the worst cop in the world. There wasn't a standard.

This is where I grew up. I can remember I was a junior in high school. I was out with my friends and three gunmen with masks on jumped out of the car. And I can remember the guy having a gun to my chest and no one did anything. No one called the cops.

They just let it go. I go home, I'm talking to my dad and I'm telling him it's not even worth calling the cops. You're not going to catch him.

My dad sat me down. You can sit here and you can complain about the system or you can get into the organization and become a solution. When I first took over as chief, we had probably close to 100 people that were working Monday through Friday in administrative assignments.

We transferred these people to work the streets, nights and weekends, when crimes occurring and where crimes occurring. This was not very well accepted. Why did you sign up for this livelihood? Certainly wasn't for the stock options. If you don't want to protect people, then don't be a police officer.

Criminal Element started to operate with a sense of impunity. In 2012, we saw our crime rate in the city exceed that of third world countries. There was nights on a Saturday or Friday night where we had three cops from the entire city. You could get the heck beat out of you just walking around the corner.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I was committed to try something different, to do something that had never been done in New Jersey before. The entire Camden City Police Department will be dismantled, replaced with a countywide force.

The Metro Division will have an additional 130 officers. We will be proud when Camden is no longer in the top five of the most dangerous cities in America. It's not a popular decision, but it really, truly was the right thing to do for the people in this city, and we did it.

We dedicated our lives to this city, and now we feel betrayed. Every member of the city police department was essentially laid off, including myself. We get a letter in the mail asking if we want to go to Camden County Metro. And I'll be honest, my first thought was, no.

I was right back to that 17-year-old boy. I was pissed off. And I was angry.

I started to actually lose faith in the system. And I wondered, what were the people in charge thinking? And then I had to think, if I leave and don't show them the right way to do it, then I'm just as bad as the drug dealers.

Seldom in life do you ever get the opportunity to hit the reset button. I really didn't care about your past. I didn't care about your gripes, your grievances. I told the officers in the neighborhoods, I don't measure the number of arrests you make and I don't care how many tickets you write.

We want you to build relationships. What I want to see are people sitting on their front steps and children riding their bicycles. Generally the only time we ever knocked on somebody's door it was when bad things were occurring. It was either A moment of crisis or a moment of enforcement. But when people saw that we were there to help, when they saw that we would be in that neighborhood with a greater level of frequency than the drug dealer who was standing on the corner, people welcomed that.

We started giving the community back its neighborhoods strategically. Princes and Wildwood was one of our most dangerous corners in the city. We made it one of our safest areas just by presence.

Of course we had to lock a couple people up, but... Once we did, we stayed there. Hello, how are you doing today, sir?

People actually were speaking to us and I would ride around on a bike with the officers and they would clap, give us standing ovations as we rode down their blocks. It was amazing. It was a two-part process, but once we do our job, we had city workers come in.

and tear down the abandoned buildings that were used for drug activity and prostitution. So it's given them hope again. By getting the critical mass of people leaving their homes and occupying public space, we could slowly withdraw.

Because now that the people were able to secure it themselves, we didn't have to be there 24-7 anymore. If somebody tries to come back, they're quick to get on the phone and say, listen, these guys are back. We need you and we're there for you. When I was younger they used to walk the beat and they're back to doing that now. Everywhere you go you see them.

There's a lot less drug activity and a lot less crime going on. I went to jail for 10 years. I was released from prison February 13, 2013. When they changed the police force, order returned because you don't have the cop throwing the little boy against the wall taking the money. He starts seeing the cops presence, the cop walking the beat. He's not worrying about what you used to do because they had a strategy.

I got to know him and he's a very intelligent guy, a guy that really cared about the city, but he was dealt a tough... So I reached out to him. I heard he got out of prison.

The offer was to help him not lock up 14, 12-year-old little boys, and he had a project called Guardian. What we seen in Camden is, like, third of our violent crime was by kids. You can't arrest your way out of the problem. Deputy Chief Wysocki came to our office and he said, I would really love to do something with the younger kids that are getting in trouble in the city. We met with 40 and 50 youth who have already had contact with the police.

department who might be in their beginning of gang involvement, who might be just getting on the wrong path and not going to school. And we talked to them about what a difference their life could be if they made different choices. And we offered social services, especially to their parents, because a lot of moms say, I didn't know I had somebody who would help me.

I didn't know where to turn. And they came to it more clearly. Places they can't reach, I can reach. Which school y'all go to? Which one?

Which one you go to? As soon as he said, Mark, I don't want to lock these kids up. You know, if we talk to them, maybe we can spin them around.

I thought to myself, If somebody would have talked to me at that age, I would have spun around and says, look, I got to give myself a chance. Y'all going to book it, okay? We'll talk to you soon, okay?

All right. Take it easy, puppy. All right, you too, little shorty.

I tore it up. I should be able to help them put it back together. We hear like so much on the news and stuff about police brutality and them hurting the youth. And now you see them out here helping the youth, interacting with them. It's like you have this opportunity to change the generation.

Because not all cops are bad cops. Having fun? I'm an officer, huh?

Oh, man. You outrank me now. I'll switch that one up. I work with a group called River Primus. We get kids off the street, we bring them into camp, have classes, kind of distract them of like what's going on from the outside.

Maybe I need to be taller. Or older. He doing it? Keep going.

Don't give up. You got it. You got it.

Keep going. My thoughts on the police are like, they can bond with the little kids, but we're the most dangerous thing to them. Like, teens are very not cool to the police. The police should be someone who we feel like make us think.

but they aren't. Instead, when we see a police officer, we think to go the opposite way. Their attitude, the way they present themselves, it's like terrifying. It's good if you try to talk to the local people, don't have them feeling like you're so...

oh, I'm a cop, I might just take you down for any reason whatsoever, you know. Hold a conversation or take a stroll with a pedestrian. Once you do that, you slowly but surely gain the trust of the community.

And, you know, when people are walking by you, they just might, hey, Officer Brown, or hey, Officer Cortez. All right, man, bag me. Nice to meet you.

All right, man? Please, bag me. Have a nice day. Attention roll call. At ease.

Bowman. Sir. You'll be 952 with Hunter.

You'll be in Guardian Zone 1, walking slash mobile. If you're looking to change a culture from within, you have to first teach the officers the way that you want them to act, and then you have to sustain that training over time. There are some groups that have an inherent distrust of us based on our history, right? So if they're already distrustful of us and now we're standing there with our hand on our gun, it sends a message to them that we are maybe aggressive.

What do they see when they see us coming? is a big deal. We're going to talk about how to identify bias in your direct reports.

You may not know you have a bias and now after taking this class you have signs to look for and say, okay, all right, listen, maybe am I handling this a little bit differently? Would everybody agree in here that a sergeant is the most influential person on an officer out there? You're going to come back and they're like, hey, boss, I got to go to this fair and impartial policing training.

You know, how was it? Your response at that moment is going to have a lot of impact on that officer and the way that they perceive the training. Part of the reason for being a leader is you have to be able to step back from your position and say, okay, what do I need to do better?

Which in turn is going to trickle down to my officers. I've always believed that as a police officer or as a military soldier, I have to be held to a hundred percent. higher standard because I have the ability to take away your rights and liberties.

We have to put them in scenario-based training that gets them not necessarily going immediately to their firearm if that can be avoided. If the only person that you're dealing with is armed with a bat or armed with a knife, take a step back, begin to communicate. Drop the knife.

Sir, drop the knife. I think that we can avoid some of the deadly force encounters that have happened in recent time. Our job is not jury and executioner. Our job is just to bring peace to the situation and let the system handle it. You are given an enormous amount of authority and power with that badge that sits upon your chest.

You are the only entity of government that is authorized to utilize deadly force upon its citizenry. That is a tremendous, a tremendous amount of authority. And it's something that we have to ensure that when it comes the time that we have to do that, that we have exhausted every other option.

This is about a culture of de-escalation, not just training in de-escalation. Culture is a shared set of values or beliefs. Culture is not a rule, it's the standard of which we hold each other to.

The reason why people call the police is because they're in the worst time of their life and at that time we're the only ones that can help them resolve that problem. You just stay away from me. Great, we're here to help you.

Remember, keep your tactical L. No. Stay away from me.

You want your gun out. I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want to kill myself so just stay away.

Listen, you don't want to do that. Remember, keep distance away. Distance and stay behind cover. Cabrinha, if you just put the knife down. All right, find out what the problem is.

Remember, you gotta try and fix it. He doesn't understand. You don't understand. Nobody understands.

Nobody cares. We do. And that's why we're here. Tell me what your problems are.

Tell me. He made me take medicine and then it makes me see things and I don't wanna take it anymore. So that's why I drink. Slow it down and take a step back and you talk. And that changes everything.

Empathy is key. Honestly, I truly do believe it works. You can't. Negotiate with anybody if your weapon's down range at them like that.

That's all a person sees. You can't just have all brawn and no brain and no morals. The mental side of the training, it reduces that gray area.

It makes you stop and gives you that second to think to make that right decision. We're here, you're on 27. Turn off the high speed right now. We're responding to a call for a 96. That's 10 code for a mentally disturbed person.

You didn't take anything? No. No? OK.

Are you on any type of medication? All right. I know. Listen, don't get overwhelmed. My main concern is that you're OK, OK?

Because they told us that you were stressed out. You were walking through the street, a little bit incoherent. We need to make sure you look. Where were you working at? You're so upset.

No, it's just issues. I mean, kids, that's it. I mean, frustration. Listen, this is what we're going through, okay?

Because I need to make sure you're going to be okay after I finish talking to you, okay? We have EMS coming up. They're going to talk to you. They might be able to refer you to any other place that you might want to go to. No, I'm not going to go there.

Do me a favor. Take your hands out of your pocket. Put your hands right here where I can see you.

We're just offering you services to make sure you're good. Okay. Everybody stresses.

Take it one day at a time. Take a deep breath. Okay?

Right now, I just want you to relax. Respect goes a long way because that would de-escalate a situation a great deal. You treat them like human beings. When you put yourself in somebody else's shoes, they can read that.

When you have somebody who is mentally challenged or on a narcotic, that's one of the most dangerous situations an officer will ever be in because you're not dealing with a rational person. With her ver- skills she was able to defuse the situation, keep him calm until paramedics arrived. Our main priority is to get him help and resolve the situation without having to use force.

And she did a really good job. I come from an old police background and I mean I was in SWAT, TAC force. I lived for action.

I wanted to kick in doors, chase bad guys. If you'd have talked to me four years ago when I'm riding in the back of a SWAT truck about to hit a door and told me that a walking beat and a couple of bicycle units could clean up the city, I would have had a few choice words for you. But, it did.

The chief's plan is working. I think that many of us in law enforcement and justice post Ferguson and post Gardner in New York City unfortunately became very optically focused on the facts of the incident in and of itself. If you really listen to the people what they were talking about were the perceived inequities on thousands and thousands of occasions that occurred prior to that and the incident just basically served as a flashpoint. When I allowed myself to really hear what was being said out there I think there is a tremendous amount of validity in it.

There needs to be dialogue with the people in my community, and these don't need to take place in town hall settings. He got off his butt and came into the community, and he made himself known at various businesses, and I give him credit for that. It should have been done in the 40s. People of color have always been victimized. It's time for rebirth, and you see it happening.

But look what it took to get to this point. So where do we go next? Really connecting with the community, connecting with anybody. It starts with empathy. You know, it wasn't but 40 years ago we had incidents in Selma, Alabama at the foot of Edmund Pettus Bridge.

None of us were standing there and did the things that were done that day. And we may not be responsible for it, but we're responsible to it as an organization, as an institution. And that those memories are still very fresh in people's minds. And that's what this uniform sometimes represents.

And the only way we're going to be able to change that experience and that opinion is to offer new experiences, to shape new opinions. And that can only be done through human contact. And that's why baseball, you know, it's America's game.

But I think we as Americans are actually a certain subset of African-American or Latinos in communities like Camden have opted out of our citizenship and our right. So anything near you, you go get it, right? Anything.

Go. You know, I was born and raised in this neighborhood. Baseball was gone for almost 15 years. We dig the hole, we dig out the hole. The game ain't over.

How do we feel? Good! Good! So when I looked at 15-year-olds and their lifetime, they had never seen a baseball game in their neighborhood. So when we formed the league, it was to make sure that as many kids that wanted to play could play.

This league challenged men and women that were engaged in drug dealing and drug use to consider our parks as a place not for that type of activity. And at the same time we invited them if they had children, little brothers, little sisters, cousins, to bring them back to the park because even the worst of us have moments of sanity and clarity when we wish the best for someone else. So why not capitalize on that common ground and see if we could build from that.

When we look nationally at crime sh**, stats. The rising segment of violent offenders are youth between the ages of 12 and 16 and we in the league believe that baseball can help fix that. It may sound simple but we believe the rules of engagement and how you play, how you resolve disputes isn't based on one person's interpretations like we all have a say and that's how we help develop a sense of democracy.

When there's a level of trust, not just with the police department, but with our neighbors, it creates community. When we see each other on the street, people say hello. It's like a normal neighborhood again.

So it's not just that they're present, that the cars are driving. around, they'll introduce themselves, they'll play with the kids, they'll talk to the teachers. They're much more willing to engage with people and then therefore I think the people in the neighborhood are willing to engage back with them.

We're only as good as our community allows us to be. Without them making a phone call, without them talking to the walk and beat officer, we can't be an effective police department. I've been dealing with the juvenile population in the city for a really, really long time, and I've heard parents tell their kids, don't talk to the cops, they're the enemy.

This is a seismic shift within the past three years that this event occurred and the kids are actually running towards the police. So it's hugely important, especially because our city is so young. Our juvenile population is almost half the population of Camden. When I was 17, I became an EMT and then I plan on going back to college and just, you know, work from there.

What's up, guy? You know you got some mustard right here. We do have a long way to go. We still have problems with poverty and crime.

There's still, you know, drugs being sold. But as far as the way that it was three years ago, it's a huge improvement. There's not a finish line here.

No matter how great our reductions are in crime statistics, the people that live in my community, they judge their safety as whether or not they can walk to the corner store or whether their child can ride the bicycle outside of their home. And it was refreshing and amazing to see people that were extremely disgruntled and very suspect in whether they were going to apply for the new organization are now some of my senior commanders. We're out here.

We're. Interacting with the community, but what's actually helping the city too is that the state is putting efforts into revitalizing Camden. The city is coming alive.

I was at a point where I was about to move, and I'm content to stay. If they hadn't made that change, I probably would have been out of here, but I'm staying. I'm happy, and if it keeps on going the way it's going, then my kids will probably stay here too.

Everybody wants to know what is community policing. What it really boils down to is that it is about treating people with respect and dignity and making the lives of the people of the city better.

Transcript for:Transforming Policing in Camden

Transcript for:
Transforming Policing in Camden