Community Voice: A Former Camden Cop Challenges the Narrative | Stephen Danley

This guest post, from a former Camden police officer, was passed along to me by the Camden County NAACP. The post is in response to a post by Channel 3 News in Memphis titled “What Memphis can learn from the war on crime in Camden.” Here is Memphis video, followed by the guest post.

The Truth

Memphis: Want the truth? Don’t listen to the press, listen to the officers who were thrown out of Camden.

In Camden, the department went from an “older, diverse” department (roughly 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Hispanic) to 60% white and less minorities.
Civil Service rules (you know the ones where officers take a state test for promotions) were suspended and the chief was able to promote his friends several ranks up the ladder, better who you know than what you know.
Crime was driven up prior to the county takeover. Notice they will only compare the Metro stats to the high 2 years just prior. How did this happen? Well, they assigned double, even triple, the number of officers on their days off to patrol empty parking lots for concerts that were not starting until hours later. Thus costing the city the difference.
Overtime was driven through the roof. Officers spouses actually complained at a City Council meeting that there was too much unwanted/unneeded overtime being forced on an already stretched-thin force. No time off to de-stress.
Crime numbers are artificially and illegally being changed.
Burglaries are being changed to thefts (theft from auto in many cases) or trespassing (burglaries to buildings).
Aggravated assaults are being changed to simple assaults. (this is documented in a Philadelphia Inquirer article by Michael Boren.)
Since then, they are not allowing reporters to see incident reports, which was always the practice in the past. What are they hiding by trying to circumvent OPRA and say they are “active investigations” ???
Metro was called to an occupied auto that was shot up near Pennsauken, instead of attempted murder or aggravated assault, it was made a “criminal mischief”.
Listen carefully to the stats they quote: if they say “daytime shootings are down”, look at all shootings or nighttime shootings. They usually carefully craft the statistics they report to the public.
The chief and other administrators are being sued by two former internal affairs commanders for violating the Attorney General’s policy on Internal Affairs procedures. He has created a culture of fear and intimidation.
Turnover and attrition in the Metro department are higher than any year in the city. Officers are trying to get out in droves. Why? What they tell the public and what they tell and do to the officers are two completely different things.
A lawsuit was also filed (I don’t believe it is finished yet) that said that the administration was using a quota system. This doesn’t sound like “we aren’t going to arrest our way out”.
Severe and unfair discipline was levied against any who “they” thought was not on the “team”, whether real or merely perceived. Under this administration, it was a living hell to work there.
Certain members of the community are used as mouthpieces for quotes in the press, which is politically controlled by the same entities who pushed for the county takeover.
The new budget of the county metro department DOES NOT INCLUDE many costs that the city budget included, including DISPATCH and much of the CONCERT costs.
Does the term “snake oil salesman” mean anything to you? If you have to keep telling people how great you are, are you really great?
The fact of the matter is, they are only approaching the same numbers that were in Camden in 2009, prior to the political experiment known as Camden County Police Department. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.