Camden Gets the Kudos for Community Policing that Wilmington Could Have Had

So you’ve heard me talk about the successes that Camden has had in bending the curve of their crime and violence issues — and today, President Obama travels to Camden to recommend the Camden Community Policing approach as a national model. This accompanies the release of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing report today:

The report endorsed Thomson’s view that “community policing cannot be a program, unit, strategy or tactic. It must be the core principle that lies at the foundation of a police department’s culture.

“The only way to significantly reduce fear, crime and disorder, and then sustain these gains is to leverage the greatest force multiplier: the people of the community,” Thomson testified.

Community policing has to be the way policing gets done in a place like Wilmington. Demilitarize, get back to communities and establish the kind of partnerships that don’t provide many opportunities for criminals to get comfortable in a neighborhood. This is the kind of policing that was envisioned when Bud Freel and Kevin Kelly created the Community Policing Deployment plan for Wilmington almost 10 years ago. back then, Chief Szcerba told us that he needed more officers to make this plan work. He got those resources (with alot of community support) and the community’s plan was thrown away. What we got was a Community Policing Unit, the claim that everyone on the force was a community policing officer, no 24/7 Deployment but the Chief got all of his new shiny resources. Some units were very effective (West Center City always had great units) and others barely showed up. But certainly not all officers were Community Officers. Then the Williams Administration cut back on the Community Policing Unit — to a sergeant and one officer per councilmanic district. Basically an afterthought in the WPD, but these officers where hugely popular and effective. They could have used more — but instead of building on success, they decided to eliminate this unit for the duration of Operation Disrupt. The WPSSC heard a great deal from Wilmingtonians about their community police officers and the need to get them back in the community — enough that these comments rated their own Appendix in the report. We don’t know when these officers come back to communities or even if the same officers will come back. But the Williams Administration keeps promising that these officers will be back — not enough, because implementing Best Practices (even when your community was once on the cutting edge of this Best Practice) is apparently responding to a Political Agenda.

Anyway, good for Camden to get some kudos and attention today. Their policing model can’t change all of the city’s problems and internally, the CPD has a great deal of turnover and other issues. But their results are tough to argue with. Wish we could get those kinds of results in Wilmington, though.