In 2025, Camden, New Jersey — a city of roughly 72,000 people just across the river from Philadelphia — recorded its first homicide-free summer in nearly 50 years. The city finished the year with just 12 homicides, down from a staggering 67 in 2012, when Camden's murder rate was 18 times the national average. The stunning turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly formed Camden County Police Department, which was established in 2013 and replaced the Camden City Police Department, to be hailed as a model of reform.
But the path wasn't smooth. When the new department launched, it adopted an aggressive broken-windows approach — cracking down on loitering, tinted windows, bicycles without bells, and other minor infractions. In 2014 alone, officers made over 60,000 stops, and the number of citations issued more than tripled. Citizens filed twice as many excessive-force complaints in 2014 as in the previous year.
This is where community pressure became decisive. Organizations like the Camden County chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up attention to these figures by issuing announcements and press briefings. Local media used public records laws to dig up the data, and researchers added academic weight to the criticism.
On the very day in May 2015 that President Obama visited Camden to praise its policing progress, the ACLU-NJ fired back with a scathing statement warning that the city was still relying on discredited tactics. That kind of persistent, evidence-based pushback from civil society, activists, and local journalists helped shape a more accountable police force — and that story is just as important as the crime statistics.
