Camden, New Jersey, has long had a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in America. In 2012, the city made an unprecedented move by terminating its entire 270-person police force in favor of hiring non-unionized workers supervised by the county. Officials at that time said that union contracts, in a city with amajor lack of revenue, made it financially impossible to keep enough officers on the street. Two years after the overhaul, the department employed 411 officers with nearly the same budget.
During a visit to the city last year, President Obama praised the Camden County Police Department for it’s drastic turnaround in its culture and its ability to build community relations. Obama called the department a “symbol of promise for the nation.” Still, the city’s beefed-up police force looks drastically different than the city that surrounds it: While 94 percent of the city’s population is non-white, white officers make up 68 percent of the Camden’s officers. High-profile police shootings in cities like Ferguson, Cleveland, and Falcon Heights, have highlighted communities around the nation that are fractured along racial lines, and have tense relationships with the police.
Officer Cabria Davis, who was born and raised in Camden, has worked for the Camden County Police Department for two years. I spoke to Davis about her school-patrol assignment; what it takes to build trust in a community; processing police brutality as a black, female cop; and why helping kids interact with police is good for everyone in the community. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
[For more of this story written by Adrienne Green, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...lice-schools/498251/]
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