Community Control of Policing: What Camden Proved When They Fired Every Cop and Started Over

In May of 2013, the city of Camden, New Jersey — a city that was, at the time, the most dangerous in the United States, a city where the murder rate was eighteen times the national average, where open-air drug markets operated in daylight, where the police department was so riddled with corruption that federal prosecutors had convicted or charged multiple officers for planting evidence, stealing drugs, and conducting illegal searches — did something that no major American city had ever done. It dissolved its entire police department. Every officer. Every badge. Every contract. The Camden Police Department, with its 175 years of institutional history and its institutional rot, was abolished, and in its place the city and Camden County created a new force: the Camden County Metro Police Department. The officers who wanted to join the new department had to reapply. Most were not rehired. The union contract was void. The training protocols were rewritten from scratch. And what happened next should be studied by every city in America that is serious about the relationship between policing and the communities police are meant to serve, because what happened next was that it worked.

Violent crime in Camden dropped 67% over the following decade. Excessive force complaints fell by 95%. Homicides declined from 67 in 2012 to 23 in 2020. Community trust, as measured by surveys conducted by Rutgers University, increased substantially across every demographic group, including the Black and Latino communities that had been the primary targets of the old department’s abuse. And the police force actually grew — the new department hired more officers than the old one had employed, at lower cost, because the elimination of the union contract allowed the county to redirect resources from overtime and pension obligations into headcount and training.

What Camden Did Differently

The Camden model is routinely mischaracterized in the national conversation about policing, and the mischaracterization serves the interests of people on both sides of the debate who prefer slogans to solutions. The left invokes Camden as evidence that police departments should be “defunded” or abolished. The right dismisses it as an anomaly or ignores it entirely. Both are wrong. Camden did not defund its police. It restructured them. It did not reduce the number of officers. It increased them. What it changed was not the presence of police but the philosophy, the training, the accountability mechanisms, and the relationship between officers and the people they serve.

The new department was built on a community policing model that treated residents as partners rather than adversaries. Officers were required to knock on doors in their assigned neighborhoods, introduce themselves, and ask residents what problems they wanted addressed. Walking beats replaced car patrols. De-escalation training became the foundation of use-of-force policy rather than an afterthought. Officers were trained to treat every encounter as a potential relationship rather than a potential arrest. And critically, the department created robust accountability structures: body cameras on every officer, a use-of-force tracking system that flagged patterns, an internal affairs operation that was independent of the command staff, and civilian input on hiring and promotion decisions.

“The purpose of policing is not to control the community. It is to be controlled by the community. When that relationship is reversed, both the police and the community suffer.”
— Chief J. Scott Thomson, Camden County Metro Police Department

The results were not merely statistical. They were visible. The open-air drug markets that had operated with impunity were shut down — not through mass arrests but through a combination of enforcement and social services. Officers began carrying cards with information about addiction treatment, job training programs, and housing assistance, and they were evaluated on their ability to connect residents with resources, not merely on their arrest numbers. The department’s internal metrics shifted from a model that rewarded punitive contact to one that rewarded community engagement, and the behavioral change was immediate and measurable.

The CAHOOTS Model: When Cops Are Not the Answer

If Camden demonstrates what reformed policing can accomplish, the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, demonstrates something equally important: that many situations currently handled by armed police officers should not involve police at all. CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets — has been operating since 1989, dispatching two-person teams consisting of a crisis counselor and a medic to calls involving mental health crises, substance abuse, homelessness, and welfare checks. In 2019, CAHOOTS responded to approximately 24,000 calls — roughly 17% of the Eugene Police Department’s total call volume — and requested police backup in only 311 of them, a rate of about 1.3%.

The cost savings are extraordinary. A CAHOOTS response costs approximately $150. A police response to the same type of call costs approximately $600 when you account for officer time, vehicle costs, and the downstream expenses of arrests and booking. Eugene estimates that CAHOOTS saves the city approximately $8.5 million per year in public safety costs while producing better outcomes for the people in crisis — fewer arrests, fewer emergency room visits, fewer uses of force, and more connections to appropriate services.

Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) program, launched as a pilot in 2020 and expanded in 2021, applies the same model to a larger and more diverse city. In its first six months, STAR responded to over 1,400 calls involving mental health crises, substance abuse, and poverty-related issues. None of the contacts resulted in arrest. None required police backup. And a study by the Stanford Computational Policy Lab found that the areas served by STAR experienced a 34% reduction in reports of minor criminal offenses, suggesting that the non-police response was not merely addressing crises but actually preventing the escalation that leads to criminal behavior.

What Community Control Actually Means

The phrase “community control of policing” has been used so loosely that it has lost its specificity, and the absence of specificity has allowed it to be dismissed as either utopian or threatening, depending on the politics of the person doing the dismissing. But community control is neither a slogan nor a fantasy. It is a set of concrete, implementable mechanisms that have been tested in multiple jurisdictions and that produce measurable improvements in both public safety outcomes and community trust. These mechanisms include the following.

First, community input on hiring. Civilian review panels that participate in the selection of police chiefs and command staff, ensuring that the leaders of the department reflect the values and priorities of the community. This is already practiced in several jurisdictions and is not radical; it is the same principle that governs the selection of school superintendents and city managers.

Second, residency requirements. Officers who live in the communities they police have different incentives, different relationships, and different outcomes than officers who commute from suburbs. The data on this is consistent: departments with strong residency requirements have lower excessive force rates and higher community trust scores. The challenge is that residency requirements reduce the applicant pool, which means they must be paired with compensation sufficient to attract qualified candidates willing to live where they work.

Third, mandatory de-escalation training that is not a one-day seminar but a core competency, tested and evaluated with the same rigor as firearms proficiency. The Police Executive Research Forum has documented that departments that implement comprehensive de-escalation training see significant reductions in both uses of force and officer injuries — because a situation that does not escalate to violence is safer for everyone, including the officers.

Fourth, civilian review boards with subpoena power. The distinction between civilian review boards that work and those that do not is almost entirely a function of authority. Boards that can compel testimony, access records, and impose discipline produce accountability. Boards that can only recommend are theater. The Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City, despite its limitations, has demonstrated that independent civilian oversight reduces the frequency of misconduct complaints and, more importantly, changes officer behavior before complaints are filed.

Fifth, transparency in data. Every use of force, every traffic stop, every arrest, disaggregated by race, geography, and officer, published quarterly and accessible to the public. The Ferguson effect — the fear that transparency and oversight will cause officers to disengage — has not been supported by the data. In jurisdictions with DOJ consent decrees that mandated transparency, crime did not increase. In most cases, it continued to decline.

Why “Defund” Failed and What Should Replace It

The “defund the police” slogan that dominated the discourse following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 was a strategic catastrophe for police reform. This is not an opinion about its intellectual merits. It is an observation about its political consequences. Polling consistently showed that the phrase was rejected by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Black Americans. A Gallup survey in June 2020 found that 81% of Black Americans wanted police to spend the same amount of time or more in their neighborhoods. An overwhelming majority wanted reform — better training, more accountability, less excessive force — but they did not want fewer police. They wanted different police.

The slogan alienated precisely the moderate white voters whose support is necessary for the legislative coalitions that produce reform. It gave ammunition to opponents of any change, who could now characterize every reform proposal as part of the “defund” agenda. And most damagingly, it created a false binary — abolish versus support — that erased the space where the most productive reforms actually live: the space where police are present but accountable, where response is calibrated to the nature of the call, where officers are trained as guardians rather than warriors, and where communities have genuine authority over the institutions that police them.

The Blueprint That Exists

Camden is not a theory. CAHOOTS is not a theory. Denver STAR is not a theory. DOJ consent decrees, for all their limitations, have produced measurable improvements in every jurisdiction where they have been implemented with adequate resources and political will. The tools for transforming the relationship between Black communities and policing are not hypothetical. They exist. They have been tested. They have produced results. What has been missing is the political will to scale them, the organizational capacity to sustain them, and the public discourse that distinguishes between what sounds good as a chant and what works as a policy.

The communities that are most affected by both over-policing and under-policing — communities that are simultaneously surveilled and neglected, harassed and abandoned — deserve better than slogans from any direction. They deserve the Camden model: competent, accountable, community-directed policing that treats residents as the employers of officers rather than the subjects of them. They deserve the CAHOOTS model: responses calibrated to the nature of the crisis, with armed officers deployed when weapons are needed and counselors deployed when compassion is needed. They deserve transparency, civilian authority, and the recognition that the purpose of a police department is not to protect itself from accountability but to protect the community that funds it.

None of this requires a revolution. All of it requires sustained political engagement at the local level — the school board level, the city council level, the mayoral level — where policing policy is actually determined. Camden did not change because a president signed a bill. It changed because a county government, under pressure from residents who demanded better, made a decision that was politically difficult and operationally complex and saw it through. Every community in America has that same power. The question, as always, is whether we will use it.