Also this issue: Tale Of The Tape Six Months After A New Jersey State Trooper Killed A -Brian Hickey

July 17-23, 2003

cover story

The State Police in Camden

Photo By: Mike Mergen

by Brian Hickey

It’s never been easy for the state police in Camden. Since the early 1990s, they’ve thrice been sent in to help the locals control what’s traditionally been one of the nation’s worst per-capita crime cities.

Some residents say they're skeptical of highway-trained troopers' ability to understand urban policing and inextricably point to 1996, when a trooper shot and killed a convicted drug dealer outside a Chinese restaurant.

In that case, troopers say they witnessed a drug deal and when one confronted the seller, he pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and started firing. One trooper was wounded as he and three others returned fire, felling the 23-year-old suspect. That focused attention on whether the troopers were properly trained to handle policing Camden. They don't know anybody here, so how can they know what's going on? went the argument.

Both life-and-death and public-relations considerations were taken into account last May when Gov. Jim McGreevey announced 100 troopers would be dispatched to "provide Camden residents with the safety and quality of life they deserve." Among those officers were Daniel Ellington and John Hayes, who volunteered for the assignment.

The Camden Anti-Crime Partnership was part of McGreevey's $175 million Municipal Rehabilitation and Economic Recovery Act, a plan designed to provide substantial state oversight of most aspects of city government in exchange for massive investments in the city.

The troopers were still saddled with the embarrassment of the racial-profiling controversy when they entered the predominantly African-American city of about 80,000 residents. And, as part of a profiling-driven consent order, the U.S. Justice Department required all state police cruisers to be equipped with video cameras.

That, officials say, enables federal monitors to watch any traffic stop that came into question.

Today, two schools of thought on the troopers in Camden exist.

From residents in some of the blighted areas: They beat people up for no reason and still pull people over for being black. ("There's a war going on in Camden and nobody sees it," says Michael Simmons' younger brother, Bashir, for whom Simmons named his son.)

From Yolanda Aguilar, a longtime activist and leader of the Camden Community Oriented Policing Partnership, who remembers the city almost burning to the ground during the 1971 riots prompted by the police beating of a resident: "We were worried at first because last time they came in here they were seen as gangbusters, Lone Rangers. The majority of them are trying to do right by Camden. They just needed to meet people to realize we're not all part of the drug element."

Aguilar, who's seen her childhood neighborhood get decimated by the drug trade and grapples with her 19-year-old daughter (who defends drug dealers since she says it's just economics), thinks a training program held for the troopers before their arrival worked well.

"The fact that [the Simmons shooting] happened a year after they came into Camden -- we were surprised that something like that didn't happen sooner. It says something that it didn't," Aguilar says. "It shows how far we've come."