Rep. Ilhan Omar pointed to Camden, New Jersey, as a place where massive police reform has worked well despite a recent ranking listing the city as one of the most dangerous in the country.
“Here is a community that disbanded their police department that was beyond reform and this is what they were able reimagine and build together,” Omar said Monday, praising local police there for identifying “more as a member of the Peace Corps than being a special forces operator.”
Here is a community that disbanded their police department that was beyond reform and this is what they were able reimagine and build together.
“identify more as a member of the Peace Corps than being a special forces operator.” https://t.co/unwdXgMB57
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 9, 2020
The congresswoman from Minnesota shared a cable news interview during which Scott Thomson, Camden’s former police chief, explained how the city moved to a new community policing system in 2013.
“We started over,” Thomson said. “We created a police force where the philosophy was going to be empowerment of the community before enforcement of the law.”
Budget cuts forced the Camden city police department to lay off half its police force in 2011. In 2013, the Camden County Police Department took over policing in the city and rehired most of the laid-off police, along with nearly 100 other officers, but at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city, according to Governing.
Neighborhood Scout, which collects and analyzes crime data in major cities across the country, ranked Camden as the 10th most dangerous city in the country for violent crime, with a 16.2 violent crime rate per 1,000 residents. The organization said the average resident in Camden has a 1 in 62 chance of falling victim to violent crime such as rape, assault, or murder.
A nationwide movement led by Black Lives Matter has increased calls for major police reforms following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after a white officer knelt on his neck.
Several prominent politicians, activists, and protesters have demanded local governments “defund the police” and scale down the militarization of law enforcement equipment.
Omar, who represents the district where Floyd died, supports the idea.
“I will never stop saying: Not only do we need to disinvest from police, but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” Omar said at a rally over the weekend. “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root. And so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to arise. And that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us.”
On Sunday, a veto-free majority of the Minneapolis City Council signed a pledge to dismantle the city police department as it is currently structured and reallocate funding to other areas of the city’s public safety budget.
President Trump has vowed to keep funding levels for police where they are, and presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden has brushed aside the idea of reducing funding to police departments.
