Bad at the best of times

Joseph Goldstein has an article in The New York Times about the current (and deteriorating) state of Camden, New Jersey:

Since the city laid off nearly half its police force in January, the mayor and police chief have tried to stay positive, with the police chief even suggesting that his leaner force will be a model for others facing similar circumstances.
But, after the layoffs of 163 police officers, Camden is feeling the impact. Callers to 911 who report things like home burglaries or car break-ins are asked to file a report over the phone or at police headquarters; officers rarely respond in person. “If it doesn’t need a gun and a badge at that location,” officers are not sent, the city’s police chief, J. Scott Thomson, said last week.
Residents have taken their own precautionary measures. One homeowner, Randolph Norfleet, has used the heavy snow this winter as a deterrent to local drug dealers, shoveling each storm’s accumulation onto the footpath where the dealers lurked alongside his home.
Police headquarters now sits nearly empty, its front reception window sometimes closed, as most of the department’s staff has been pushed onto the street for patrol duty. Detectives cannot devote as much time to investigations; a widely praised bicycle unit was disbanded. Even the canine unit lost two of its three dogs.
It is too early to tell if the police layoffs have allowed more crime to occur; in the first two months of 2011, there were fewer homicides than during the same period last year. But the number of assaults involving a firearm has more than tripled to 79 from 22 over that period.
“We can’t make a direct connection between the layoffs and that increase, but those assaults give you the impression they feel emboldened that there is not a police officer around the corner, or within earshot,” said the Camden County prosecutor, Warren W. Faulk.
The layoffs of 163 officers came at a time when the South Jersey city of 80,000, long a symbol of urban blight (it has no movie theater, few supermarkets and a severe shortage of jobs) had finally started to feel safer, residents say. In each of the last two years, Camden recorded fewer than forty murders, significantly less than the 54 murders of 2008, when the city was ranked the most dangerous in America, according to a widely quoted survey.
Then a $14 million deficit in the Police Department’s budget, combined with failed union negotiations, led to the unthinkable: laying off officers in a city that clearly could benefit from more police, not less. The layoffs left Camden with 204 police officers, its smallest department since 1949, when a mentally ill man, Howard Unruh, shot to death thirteen of his neighbors in East Camden.
Forced to restructure the department after the layoffs, Chief Thomson demoted many of his senior officers to patrol duty. As other cities reckon with budget deficits and mounting pension costs, he says he believes his counterparts in other cities will find themselves working under the same constraints as he now does. “I believe that, as we move forward, the Camden Police Department will provide a blueprint for the rest of the nation for how to best handle these situations,” he said last week.
Chief Thomson, 39, has cut his salary by $15,000 and hits the street himself; he personally has made about five arrests since the layoffs.
Still, at times, the department is fielding as few as a dozen patrol cars during the day, according to three current officers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss department staffing.
Before the layoffs, it was not uncommon for the department to field more than twenty patrolcars throughout the city during daylight hours, and also have plainclothes and specialized units in the streets, several officers said during interviews.
Chief Thomson said some level of assistance would come from a not-yet-operational network of surveillance cameras that will allow “officers at headquarters to conduct virtual patrol”.
For the remaining police officers who do patrol the street, the new order can feel dangerous. The Camden police, unlike their counterparts in many big city departments, patrol without a partner. Some officers say they feel less safe, and worry that a distress call over the radio will not produce sufficient levels of re-enforcement. “I am my own backup,” said a fourth patrol officer who insisted an anonymity, fearing he would be fired for talking to a reporter. He was parked on a corner of North Camden, on a block full of boarded-up homes that the police call “abandos”. Here, street dealers hawk heroin to customers who drive in from all over South Jersey, helping to fuel a narcotics trade disproportionate for a city of 80,000 residents.
In recent years, the Police Department drew up a list of “hot spots”, mostly intersections where heroin and crack cocaine were sold, and assigned officers to sit on those locations, or pass by them regularly. But on a three-hour tour to more than twenty of those locations on Saturday, two parked patrol cars were the only evidence of police that a reporter saw.
“At the majority of the problem areas, there were always officers out there, and nearby,” said Brian Razzi, who was recently laid off as a Camden police officer. “The fact you can drive around for three hours and not see any cops but two is disturbing, not just for the police but for the residents of Camden.”
Across the street from a day-care center in North Camden, a destination for heroin addicts across South Jersey, a drug dealer who had been standing on the corner for nine hours that day said he already felt less hassled by the police.
“Since the cop layoff, there is no police presence,” said a 34-year-old man who gave his name only as Jose and offered that he “still sells drugs here and there. For the drug dealers, sure that’s a good thing, but not for the residents,” he said.
The layoffs hit all officers with less than thirteen years of experience, leaving behind a middle-aged force. “They love seeing a 40-year-old cop get out of that car instead of a 24-year-old guy who can actually chase them down,” said one of the four police officers, referring to criminals.
Chief Thomson said he was relying on the residents of Camden to help make up the gap in enforcement. “You’re looking for almost a Libya-type of movement, where people want to take their city back,” he said in an extended interview.
But some officers suggested that people in Camden had quickly learned that it is no longer worth asking the police for help with minor crimes. “Citizens have given up calling the police on other crimes,” another of the four officers said. The officer said there was a community perception that “if you’re not shot or murdered, or if it does not involve a drug gang, it’s not going to be investigated.”
In interviews, residents described their own precautionary measures against crime. Mr. Norfleet, a 76-year-old retiree, knows that his strategy of using snow to deter drug dealers has its limitations, most obviously as the weather warms. Still, he recalled his shoveling with some satisfaction, filling the paths that most homeowners strike to make clear. “I loaded it up,” he said. “I tried to make it impassable.”
On Federal Street, one of Camden’s few commercial corridors, Robert Diaz, 41, a former drug dealer who said he was now a Sunday school teacher, manages a sneaker store. He said he braced for a mugging every time he walked outside. He keeps two $1 bills in the front of his blue jeans for the purpose, ready to offer to anybody who gets in his way. Mr. Diaz also has a practiced phrase for use in such encounters. “Hey,” he would say. “It’s all I got, man.”

Rico says it's another situation where concealed carry, and the willingness to use it, would help...