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PERFcast
Building Public Trust Episode 6: An In-Depth Look at One Agency’s Approach to Rebuilding Community Trust: Camden County (NJ) Police Department: Part 1
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In part one, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler speaks with former Chief Scott Thomson, who was the first chief of the new department, about the state of crime and community trust in the beginning before the reform and the actions taken to rebuild reform the department.
Speakers (4) in order of appearance:
- Dustin Waters, PERF Editor and Audio Engineer
- Rachel Apfelbaum, PERF Writer, Producer, and Narrator
- Chuck Wexler, PERF Executive Director
- Scott Thomson, former chief of Camden County (NJ) Police Department
Article on Camden County (NJ) Police Department:
- “Camden County Police Marks 10 Years of Patrolling the City” – P.Kenneth Burns, PBS, May 2023 - https://whyy.org/articles/camden-county-police-ten-year-anniversary/
This podcast series is part of the Critical Issues in Policing series, supported by the Motorola Solutions Foundation.
Thanks for listening to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. For more information on PERF, visit www.policeforum.org.
Welcome to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum.
News Anchor 6:Today is also an important milestone in the city of Camden. Ten years ago its police department was disbanded and rebuilt from the ground up. Since then the Camden County Police Department has been hailed as a model of police reform, leading to sharp cuts in crime and improved community relations.
News Anchor 7:In 2022 there were 3,000 less victims of crime in Camden City than there were in 2012. Crime is down to the lowest level in 50 years. We had a crime rate and murder rate that was higher than the murder rate in some Third World nations.
Scott Thomson:So 2012, George, was arguably the darkest hour in the city's history, particularly in terms of public safety. We had extremely high levels of mistrust, virtually no legitimacy with the community of itself. And a bold political decision was made to disband the police force and try something new.
Rachel Apfelbaum:Hi, I'm Rachel Apfelbaum, a senior research associate at PERF. Thank you for listening to this podcast series on building public trust. This two-part episode will explore how the Camden Police Department successfully used the strategies outlined in the series to turn the department and city around and become a model for community trust building and policing reform. You can find more reports on the Camden County, New Jersey Police Department's history and comparative crime data linked in the episode information. In part one, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler speaks with Scott Thomson, the first chief after the department was rebuilt.
Chuck Wexler:So you become a police officer. You move up through the department. And let's talk about those early years when you were in Camden as an officer, and then as you rose up in the department. Kind of paint the picture of what the community was like and what the department was like.
Scott Thomson:So I graduated the academy for Camden in 1994. There really wasn't another jurisdiction I wanted to work in other than Camden. My roots go back over 100 years in the city of Camden. It has always, from the moment I was growing up in my earliest memories, always been a very challenged community. And I wanted to do something meaningful there and be a part of trying to make people feel safer. And very quickly you are educated within the culture of the organization--into the conflict and the mistrust that existed between the organization and the community itself. And then, when you knew the history of the backsliding of Camden, the genesis of it was a couple acts of police violence in the late '60s and early '70s that led to race riots. And the business community fled. The middle class fled. And for most, all intents and purposes, there was an abandonment of the city, of most of its viable economic sectors. So there were very high levels of mistrust that was generational with the community and the police. And I could see very early on as a cop why those levels of mistrust existed. And to be quite frank with you, it was pretty clear that we gave them some pretty good reasons to feel that way. There was something that wasn't pleasant. It was an us-versus-them type of mentality. And there was a strong embracing of an ideology that there was nothing police could do to change the dynamics of the city.
Chuck Wexler:As I understand it, crime was significantly high. The department went through a series of police chiefs, one after another. Camden was viewed as one of the most violent communities in America. And in that environment, you would get a phone call one day from the attorney general of New Jersey. Can you talk about that period and that phone call?
Scott Thomson:So that's important context to really get a good understanding of Camden. It's a city of 77,000 that is 96% minority. And it's a location in which it's a perfect storm of social inequities. It was the nation's most dangerous city, year after year had a murder rate that was 17 times the national average. Of cities of 50,000 or more, it's the poorest in the country, with a per capita income of $16,000 a year. And it's also the highest in the country with single parent household rates of 84%. So there's a lot of elements of root-cause issues that create crime as a symptom. And we had gone through a stretch of time where there was a carousel of leaders in the organization. There had been five leaders in five years. The city itself had been taken over completely by the state of New Jersey. The governor at the time had put a chief operating officer that had to approve any and everything that was related to finances, organization, departments, and structure in the city. And the crime rate was so bad that the attorney general herself, who was Anne Milgram at the time, was overseeing the day-to-day operations of the department. This was in 2008. I had worked my way up quickly through the ranks. I was in my 14th year, I was 36 years old, and I had achieved the rank of deputy chief. I was the chief of investigations. At the time, the attorney general had deployed dozens of troopers and state investigators to help mitigate the escalating crime. So that year, we started January with I think it was 12 murders. In a city of 77,000, we were on pace to have 100 murders. And it reached about July, and there was change. And the attorney general had in one fell swoop made another leadership change. And at the time, I remember getting a phone call that the then-leadership was no longer there. And then I received a follow-up phone call from the attorney general's chief of staff, who told me that the attorney general wanted to see me in her office the next morning, and to not tell anybody that I was going up there for a meeting. So the next morning I went to the attorney general's office at the Trenton State Capitol. I thought I was going to be part of a consultation into a strategy of what the next steps would be, and particularly how that would affect crime-fighting. I remember sitting on the couch, and the door on the other side of the office opened, and in walked the attorney general. I'd only met her once before. When she came walking into the room--she's one of the most dynamic leaders I've ever met in my life--she was walking very quickly. She immediately made eye contact, locked in on me. And as she was walking, she said, Tomorrow, I'm going to name you the police chief for the Camden Police Department. I don't care what you do, or what you have to do, the body bags need to stop piling up. Do you understand me? And I said Yes, ma'am. And this was sensory overload. At the time, I had no idea this was coming. And she now sat down right in front of me and said, So what are you going to do? And I said, I need a minute to think about that. I didn't think this was what's going to happen. But then we had a conversation about things that needed to occur, and that which needed to be changed because what was going on was absolutely unacceptable. She then took me down the next day; we went into a meeting in which she had called all the city leaders and stakeholders from Camden into a single room. And the attorney general gave a fire-and-brimstone speech of the unacceptable levels of violence. A new day has dawned; there will be significant changes. And by the way, this is your police chief, the new police chief. Any questions? And the city council president was in the front row and he raised his hand. She says, Yes? And he says, What's his name? And she says, Oh, Scott, tell them about yourself, introduce yourself. And then I said, you know, who I was, and told them a little bit about my time on the police department and my vision for what I was going to do with the department in the city.
Chuck Wexler: Grace under pressure:36 years old, you're coming into an environment where I am sure that you had your enemies and your supporters inside and outside. Just to start at a baseline, what was trust like in the community, and actually within the police department too?
Scott Thomson:There was no organizational trust between the community and its police department. There were officers that had really good relationships. But as an institution, there was zero trust. And even within the organization itself, the police department was racially divided. There was a white officers' union; there was a black officers' union; there was a Hispanic officers' union. The years of incidents that predated me clearly led to this division within the organization, which was not hard to see how that manifests itself out into the community as well.
Chuck Wexler:Talk about where you took the department, with some of the initial steps you took to regain public trust and to put the department in a different direction. What were some of the strategic moves that you made that were important in regaining trust, lowering the crime rate, and building back community support? What are some of the strategic moves you made?
Scott Thomson:I remember, it must have been in about my first month of being a police chief, we were on a record pace for murders. As you know, as we just discussed, we had just had a four-year-old little boy get shot in the head in broad daylight and killed on a hot August day in the summer when two drug dealers decided to shoot it out. And I went to a community meeting and I had the top three levels of skin ripped off of me by the community, and rightfully so. They were just fed up. They were fed up with the crime; they were fed up with what they described as a non-responsive police department, a disrespectful police department. I remember in the meeting, looking up, there were about 150 people in this room. And I can see some of the officers are standing against the wall with their arms crossed, and a woman was telling me how she was pulled over by a police officer and how disrespectful he was to her in front of her children. When she was telling me this, all I could think of was my mother being pulled over and being treated that way. And when the lady got done speaking, I said, Ma'am, you have your cell phone on you? She said yes. I said, Would you please pull that cell phone out? She pulled out her cell phone. So I want you to push these numbers into your phone. And I said 609-502- and gave her my phone number. I said, Now I want you to push send. And when she did that I pulled my phone out. I held it up to the crowd. And my phone's ringing. And I said to her, I go Ma'am, that's my personal cell phone number. I said, If anybody that's standing against a wall or wearing the uniform I'm wearing now treats you, or anybody in this room is treated in a manner which was just described to me--I don't care what hour of the day it is or night--I want you to call my phone immediately. And at that point in time, I could see the room shifted. It was as if they were just conditioned to the person that would stand in front of them and give them the same message every time. And I know when they were looking at me they were thinking, same circus, different clown.
Chuck Wexler:So you just automatically put yourself out there. You didn't say, Well listen, you know, let us know, here's this community service officer over here, if you have any issues, let him know. You said, Here is my number. The message you were basically sending is, I'm holding myself accountable. And you should too, right? I mean, we talked about building trust; you somehow set the tone with that, didn't you?
Scott Thomson: It's important to let the people know that their problems are your problems. And you have to be proximate to it. Empathy is probably the greatest tool a police officer can have. By making myself available, by getting into it with them, it just redefined the relationship of the police leader with the community. You know, I even learned as a cop working the streets:people did not necessarily expect miracles from their cops. They just wanted to know you were in it with them. When you show that--you just can't say it--when you showed it, and that's being at the funerals when they're burying their child; that's knocking on the door on a Christmas Eve and handing them some food; that's sitting out on a corner with them during the summer night when, you know, my family's home barbecuing and I'm still spending time with them out there because they just want to have a peaceful night without shooting taking place. That means a lot to the people that are in those most challenging situations.
Chuck Wexler:Can you take us through some of the key points of what you went through, because that was a key part of, you know, turning that department around and the community with it.
Scott Thomson: When I started to introduce higher levels of discipline and accountability, and started to do things from leading from the front, the best officers had been waiting for this for such a long period of time. One of the biggest problems in the organization wasn't just that you had some of the worst and dirtiest cops in the world, because you also had some of the best cops in the world. The problem was, they had the ability to choose whatever it is that they wanted to do each day they came to work. There wasn't a standard to which people were being held. So once there was a standard with consistency, the really good officers started to flourish. The not-so-good officers were given a choice:they would either have to change or there was going to be an exodus of them out of the organization.
Chuck Wexler: Officers were giving an alternative:either to go with what you were recommending or basically lose their job.
Scott Thomson:You know, in a civil service system that's not a quick or easy process. You know, there's concepts of progressive discipline in an organization that really hasn't held anybody to account. You now have people that have years that have never had it and an incident of underperforming or poor performance or bad behavior. So the argument is always well, this has been a model employee for X number of years. You're the first person to ever find something wrong with them. And now you want to do something extreme. What ended up happening with the city's finances was in 2011, 46% of the organization was laid off. So we were down to about 368 sworn personnel at the time. And on January 18, 2011, 168 cops were laid off in one day.
Chuck Wexler:So all these offices are laid off. But then out of what seemed like chaos came this new agency with new values, new leadership. It really was a trying time for you as a leader. I do remember talking to you right before that period. We had a group that met with you and I remember, you know, seeing you and you were sort of in the eye of the hurricane. It was almost as though you were in Miami and they said a level-five hurricane is heading toward you, right? You remember that period?
Scott Thomson:I do. In fact, I think you even came and visited one night during that period. You know, I think if you saw that night, there was an incident where there were multiple rounds being fired at multiple locations; we didn't have enough cops to respond to them all. The one location we went to had several people shot and five handguns were recovered. We really couldn't even hold down the crime scene. I remember you remarking how we had one officer walking three prisoners in by himself, right? Because we were running so short staffed.
Chuck Wexler:I wasn't sure if it was the one officer walking the two prisoners in or the two prisoners walking the officer in.
Scott Thomson:And it was an extremely, extremely challenging time. I lost half my department in one day, in what was the nation's most dangerous city at that time. But then that led to the next step of the creation of the county police force--essentially hitting a reset button and starting over.
Chuck Wexler:What were the values that you were wanting people to aspire to? How were you setting the tone within the department and within the community?
Scott Thomson: I tried to include the community as much as I could in everything that we were doing, to the point where I brought them in, surveyed them with, What would you want to see in your next police officer? What do you want to see from your next police department? What the community said they wanted was, they wanted their police officers to have integrity. They wanted them to be empathetic. They wanted them to be responsive. You know, it was a given, right? It was what people should receive from their law enforcement officers that clearly this community had not received in decades. And so we built a process, informed by the community, to onboard all of our new officers. Every cop, including myself, Chuck, was fired. Here I was, I had been a cop for now 20 years, been a chief for five, and I had to fill out a 60-page application. I had to take a physical, had to take a psychological. And I was a temporary employee just like everyone else. And the officers that were currently on the department had to go through the same. Everybody was given an opportunity to apply. Most did. There were about 40 or 50 officers who selected themselves and decided to not apply. It was a strategy on their part:they thought if they didn't apply, we wouldn't have the numbers and we couldn't create this new police department. So they removed themselves from the process of the existing officers. I think we hired all but four or five or a couple that were under investigation for something or another. But at one point in time, early on in that, I had brought everybody into a room. Now most of the people in the room had been laid off at some point in time. And what I said to them was, I know you have a lot going on. We've been through a lot over the last 24 months. But I want to be perfectly clear with what's about to happen. Seldom in life are you ever given an opportunity to hit the reset button and start over. You're being provided one here professionally. And the requirement I have for you is to adhere to the mission of the organization in a manner that's consistent with our creed. And the mission of the organization is to reduce the number of crime victims and to make people feel safe. And our creed is service before self. If you adhere to the mission in a manner that's consistent with our creed, you have an opportunity for advancement regardless of what happened in chapter one. If you were to take that moment in time, armed with the knowledge of who was in the room, and then you were to look two, three years later and see some of my senior leadership in the organization, you would have been shocked and say, How could a person that was that resistant, now be this individual?
Chuck Wexler:From a policing standpoint, you actually changed how they policed, which is very different. And that set the tone in the department. There used to be, cops would be in cars; you did some very strategic thinking that I think helped to regain public trust.
Scott Thomson:You know, community policing can't be a unit; there needs to be a philosophy. But we had run an organization that thought the number of tickets we wrote, and the number of arrests we made, equated to good policing and good officers. But yet we were the nation's most dangerous city and we were not changing things within neighborhoods. So it was to, number one, increase human contact with people. So we went primarily with foot beats, bicycle patrols, basically took the squad cars away from them. And we would drop officers in the neighborhoods and tell them, say, Chuck, this is your responsibility for the next 12 hours. I don't want you to make an arrest unless it's for a violent crime being committed and you're present. We're not coming back for you. So if you need to go to the bathroom, you better make a friend out here. You want to get something to eat, find out who the good cook in the neighborhood is. And we want you to go up and down every house, and you're going to knock on the door and you're going to introduce yourself. And you're going to ask the people what's important to them. And then, because you're being tasked to formulate a plan with them to try to address it. We put officers out there on foot. I want to say at that point in time, seven out of every 10 doors that were knocked on, people wouldn't answer the door. And it's because they were conditioned that we were going to ask for something that would expose them to harm., right? People would generally look out the door and they would never see the cops. The only time they saw us was when a crime occurred. And then we're banging on the door and we're saying, in front of God and country and the neighborhood, Hey, we want you to talk to us. And the people that have to live there would say, Wait a second, you're supposedly the expert; you can't figure out who's doing the shooting? The only time I see you is when somebody gets shot. But the guy who's doing all the shooting I see outside my door every day. And you want me to give information on that individual while that individual is watching? No, I'm not answering my door. I didn't see anything.
Chuck Wexler: This is to me a friction point, right? Because you hear this from police departments all across the country:you know, knock on doors, go out. It seems to me you must have met with resistance internally with some of your cops and the community, who as you just expressed were fearful. How did you overcome the resistance internally and in the community? It's almost like you're a negotiator getting people to talk. How do you do that?
Scott Thomson:You know, internally it was not open for negotiation or debate. This is what we were doing. And supervisors and commanders were held to a very clear account of what the expectations were. And there were consequences if there wasn't. That started to get people to change and very reluctantly, but they would move in that direction. But that which was being asked of them to do ended up facilitating the momentum we needed because people were now engaging, and being engaged back, by members of the community in a way that they had never experienced at that point in time. You could be a Camden cop back then and drive the streets for weeks and nobody would wave to you. You represented something negative every time you showed up. You were either writing them a ticket, locking them up, or you're showing up because something really bad was happening. And we had to shift that and when we shifted that, it gave the cops the ability to get to know the people and it gave the people the ability to know the cops.
Chuck Wexler:You're holding your commanders accountable. You're pushing officers out there. You're pushing, pushing, you're showing up yourself at crime scenes. You're dealing with children and families. You're giving people your cell phone number. You can feel the momentum is starting to change. People listening to this should not be surprised at how hard this is. Jim Collins in Good to Great talks about the flywheel and having to push it, you know, continue to push it. What gets that flywheel moving?
Scott Thomson: The things that get measured are the things that get performed. And when you put a very narrow focus on demand and there is very predictable follow-up, people will start to do. And that's what we needed:we needed people to start to just do. The rest would begin to take care of itself. There were consequences for commanders if they were not doing what was being called on them to do. Because even the most reluctant folks are hard pressed to come up with good excuses when other people are succeeding in it. And that was the brilliance of CompStat with Bill Bratton and Jack Maple and the like; when you put all those executives in a room together, nobody wants to look bad, regardless of how much they don't like the direction of things. There were a lot of officers and commanders that had been waiting for permission to do this. They just needed someone to ensure that it was going to occur. Even some of the officers that were--and supervisors were the most resistant to it. I mean, I can't tell you, Chuck, the amount of times, two years into it, sometimes not even that long--a year into it--that those folks would come to me. I would either see them at a crime scene or an event and they would say, Look, I I didn't think this would ever work. I doubted it. But this is working. Here's what resonates with cops, and gets every cop's attention. You ever want to get something done with with cops, particularly workers, it's got to be safer and easier. If it's safer and easier, you've got their undivided attention. And this was easier because we were telling them, we don't want you writing tickets. We don't want you doing all this other stuff, right? Like, go be a mentor, be a guardian. That's what this community needs. And oh, by the way, when we perform in that fashion, it's actually safer for us, right? We saw less officers being assaulted. We used to have neighborhoods in which, if you went into a neighborhood with a two-man unit, and this is documented, you'd have two-man units that would go in the neighborhood. And if they made an arrest, the community would converge on them and steal the prisoner back. And when I mean community, you would see grandmothers out there; you would see mothers, wives, kids. That's how strong they felt against the police. You weren't the good guys by any stretch of the imagination. And to be able to to go from that, to a cop walking the beat in that same neighborhood 18 months later, was all the evidence that anybody had been around long enough needed to see.
Chuck Wexler: What's interesting, as things started to change, as people started answering doors, you know, all of the activities that you would do, another interesting thing started to happen:crime started to go down at the same time. Maybe not initially. You know, a lot of times people would think, this is community policing, it's making people feel better, well maybe so but people are still dying in Camden. And this actually paid off in ways that you you measured yourself, which was, will this impact on crime? Why do you think it resulted in reduced crime?
Scott Thomson:The community made us, makes us, smarter, faster, better. From the perspective of trying to reduce crime through enforcing the law and conducting investigations, the information and intelligence that you will get from a community that trust its police is absolutely invaluable. And within the first year, our solving our murders went from 16% to 61%; our gun seizures went up 70% within the first eight months; and we weren't stopping and searching and frisking everybody. And we were not investigating things any differently. We didn't get into technology. It was because we were creating moments at very high volume in which officers and the people in the community were having conversations. And in those moments, the community would seize that opportunity to share information of what was going on, even in your most crime-ridden neighborhoods. It is a very, very small percentage of the people that are responsible for a majority of the crime. What has long frustrated the people is that everybody in the community knows that--knows who those people are. But yet the professionals whose job it is to stop the crime, to deter crime, and make an arrest when a crime occurs, don't seem to know that. Which means you have little legitimacy, not to mention that when you're treating people with disrespect, and stripping them of their dignity, they're even less likely to talk to you. But being armed with that information, because of those interactions that were created, now we're able to go in the neighborhoods and surgically remove the most violent people, the people that are the drivers of violence. We're fishing with a spear and removing them and not a net.
Chuck Wexler:What is interesting for me is not just what happened when you were there but what happened when you left. Look, you were an iconoclastic leader, and sometimes it's hard to follow a leader like that. But you know, in talking to Chief Rodriguez, it's as though your vision continues. And that doesn't always happen. Why do you think that is?
Scott Thomson:I remember you telling me about the challenges that you would hear from many within SMIP, or even within other organizations where people would make significant changes, and we use the analogy that it was like a rubber band. As soon as stretching a rubber band. As soon as the leader left, you know, it just like released, it'll go right back to its previous shape. I don't think that occurred here in Camden for a couple of reasons. And it's because we had changed the culture. And what is culture? Culture is a shared set of values and beliefs. And because we were so consistent with what we did and how we did it, it just became the way things are done. And I saw during that process, many police leaders grow, mature, and develop into the best versions of themselves. I saw early on during this time that the current chief now, Gabe Rodriguez, I saw him as the future of the organization. And I saw him do remarkable, remarkable things in the face of some pretty significant adversity. It's him and people like him, like that. And the organization has them. But we were able to bring them up through the ranks and they're today's leaders. There are still people in the organization today that are from the city and they know what the city once was, as far as extreme challenges. And even the most vocal critics of what we did all agree that it's better today than what it once was. And that's hard to argue against. Many will say the process should have been different and it's a fair argument. But the results are indisputable. May 1 was the 10-year anniversary. Chuck, you're talking about 60, 65% reduction in murders and crime that's been 10 years sustained. And what I see from that organization now, I think Chief Rodriguez is going to do things that I was never able to do.
Chuck Wexler:It's an amazing story. Ten-year journey, 36-year-old product of Camden leaves Camden a better place than he found it. Great for you to take the time with us. I know there's important lessons here about overcoming challenges. And thank you very much for your leadership, and for all you've done, and for all the people of Camden who can play in the streets and can see that the police on the corner are there to find ways to support them. And that may be your legacy--that the children can play in an environment that every American should. Thank you, Chief Thomson, for your leadership.
Rachel Apfelbaum:As you just heard, the Camden Police Department made drastic improvements in crime rates and trust with the community in its first years. In part two of episode six, we will hear from current chief Gabe Rodriguez, a Camden native, and Camden community members about how this progress has been sustained, and the lessons learned.
Dustin Waters:Thanks for listening to this episode of PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. Please be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and stay tuned for upcoming episodes. For more information on PERF visit www.policeforum.org or follow us on Twitter @policeforum. Thanks again for listening. This podcast series was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Motorola Solutions Foundation.