Dr. Andrew Seligsohn is the Associate Chancellor of Rutgers-Camden’s Office of Civic Engagement. As such he coordinates much of the work on campus (or for students trying to get off campus) around community partnerships. I occasionally find myself in his office trying to get his perspective on a local issue. At one point he emailed me with a cogent defense of the Metro Police; one much better than any I’d heard. I asked him to contribute it here, and he agreed:

Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone drew appropriately critical responses in this space and elsewhere for its failure to serve up much beyond the re-heated leftovers of previous reporting on poverty and violence in Camden. What struck me as particularly unfortunate about Taibbi’s piece was that, on a few occasions, he came very close to delving into something important, only to move on to another topic without capitalizing on the opportunity to enlighten.

To cite one example: Just after noting that most of the customers buying illegal drugs come from suburban communities, Taibbi says this:

This is another potential hole in the policing plan: The fact that broken suburbs—full of increasingly un- or underemployed young people—send a seemingly limitless supply of customers for Camden’s drug trade. The typical profile is a suburban kid who tore an ACL or got in a car accident back in high school, got an Oxy prescription, and within a few years ended up here.

I live in Trenton and work in Camden, so I spend about two hours each day on the River Line. I see the phenomenon Taibbi describes at human scale. If you pay attention to the people riding the train, you can identify who is heading to Camden for work or college and who is heading to Camden to buy drugs. The buyers are just the sorts of people Taibbi identifies: young, white, and apparently aimless. They come from as far up as Bordentown, but most get on the train in the river towns from Burlington down. Some get off at the Walter Rand Transportation Center, but most stay on until the Cooper St.-Rutgers stop. Some bring cheap old bicycles on the train; others are on foot. They get off the train on Cooper, hang a left on North 3rd St., and head into North Camden. Every once in a while, their behavior suggests that they are small-time dealers, buying for others (from whom they often take phone calls while on the train) and bringing their small supply back to their hometowns.

Who are these young adults? I am not precisely sure, but the fact that they are present does not surprise me in light of regional and national economic and educational realities. As everyone knows, the Great Recession wiped out an enormous number of jobs. For the most part, those jobs returned for people with college degrees, and they didn’t return for anyone else. At the same time, college completion rates have stagnated. While college attendance has been on the rise among women, it has flattened and begun to fall off for men—African-American, Hispanic, and white. We have young African-American and Hispanic men in Camden without much to do, and we have young white men in the suburbs without much to do. They meet on the streets of Camden in a market exchange that constitutes the most consistent instance of regional cooperation in South Jersey. It is also the source of much of the misery of Camden’s residents, as it serves as the carrier for the diseases of violence and incarceration that affect so many families, while constantly increasing the supply of desperate people in the city as addicts from the suburbs end up on the city’s streets.

Taibbi sees all of this as a potential hole in the new plan for policing the city, and he is obviously right that this dynamic will make it difficult for any police force to reduce criminality in Camden. From my perspective, the flow of the drug market in and out of the city is precisely the reason why regional policing is essential. The drug trade does not recognize municipal boundaries. While the entire industry is not contained in Camden County, moving from 37 municipal police forces to one county force would be an enormous step in the right direction. The people buying drugs in Camden City are doing something to generate the income that allows them to do so. Many of them are generating that income where they live, and much of that activity is likely illegal. If local suburban leaders believe they can insulate their communities from the realities of the regional criminal enterprises that are most visible in Camden City, they are mistaken. (I am not suggesting that is why the county force was created; nor do I expect all 37 municipalities to join in the near term.)

More significantly, Taibbi’s observation calls attention to the fact that regional solutions beyond policing will be essential to reducing regional criminality and violence. Some people in the suburbs already recognize that Camden’s problems will not be contained in Camden. They are less likely to realize that Camden’s problems are increasingly the result of problems in the suburbs—lagging educational attainment, economic stagnation, the rise of suburban poverty. Those problems are themselves partly the result of the deep inefficiency of suburban sprawl. The further people flee from Camden City, the more inefficient is the region. That increase in inefficiency magnifies the social problems that link city and suburbs in a downward spiral. If we are to turn the situation around for Camden City, we will have to do so in a way that involves a turnaround for the region, driving development back to our urban cores—including the smaller river towns—and cooperating not only on policing but also in areas such as education, economic development, and public health.