Posted on 04/29/2014 11:54:07 AM PDT by Olog-hai
A year after Camden disbanded its police department and brought in a new one with more officers on the street, reported crime has dropped significantly in a city that still ranks as dangerous by any measure.
After years of doing little more than responding to emergency calls, police are on intensive neighborhood patrols, a move that has sent drug dealers scattering. But residents, advocates and officials agree that law enforcement alone can go only so far to heal a city that is also among the nations most impoverished. [ ]
Camden, a city of 77,000 across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has had decades of decline as the once-booming industrial city saw nearly all its manufacturing jobs disappear by the early 1990s.
With relatively few local businesses and low property values, most of the city governments revenue comes from state taxpayers.
(Excerpt) Read more at bigstory.ap.org ...
The moral basis for making good decisions has been systematically destroyed by government. So, you’re a fatherless child raised in government mandated poverty (as you can’t collect if you’re married or employed.) You look around and what role model do you see? A priest or preacher working to help people? Nope. A thug with fancy clothes, a boffo car plenty of street cred and a job for YOU! Are we surprised that we take morality away and we end up with immoral people?
Probably cops who can’t write very well therefor a lot of crimes go unreported. It then shows up as a reduction in crime.
Within 20 miles of Camden, with its 40% unemployment rate, thousands of jobs regularly go to undocumented farm workers.
At the risk of getting the Bundy or Sterling treatment, I would imagine that it is considered demeaning by blacks, to today’s black youth, to expect them to go work on a farm. Legacy of slavery and all that, we can’t expect blacks to go do farm work.
“Within 20 miles of Camden, with its 40% unemployment rate, thousands of jobs regularly go to undocumented farm workers.”
Probably one reason for that is that most of the citizen workers are not worth the minimum legal wage. The company I worked for had to hire 350 people off welfare to get their taxpayer provided building for $1/year. What we discovered was many of them could not read the procedures. Believe me, they were simple with no long words. We sent many for remedial reading. The legal immigrants I hired from Central America wrote better English than some college graduates. They crafted paragraphs with a topic sentence an supporting sentences where others just created bullet lists. When I enquired they said they learned to read and write English in high school. They also had a better grasp of American history.
That would put a huge crimp in the violent crime rate across the country. It would also be unconstitutional, but at some point the law-abiding citizens of this country are going to have to make a decision about how much violent crime they're wllling to tolerate.
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