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Posted on 12/29/2004 5:48:19 AM PST by OESY
CAMDEN, N.J., Dec. 23 - If anybody was surprised that Camden was recently ranked America's most dangerous city, it wasn't the people who live here.
In the past 12 months, there have been 53 homicides, including a 12-year-old shot to death on his porch for his radio, more than 800 aggravated assaults, including a toddler shot in the back of the head, at least 750 robberies and 150 acts of arson, more than 10,000 arrests and one glaring nonarrest - a serial rapist on the loose downtown.
All in a city of 79,000, nine square miles small.
For decades, Camden has been the classic model of urban despair, a place where entire city blocks are boarded up and glassy-eyed heroin addicts roam the streets and cold, empty factories stand testament to the decaying fortunes of American industry.
But for the last couple of years, the city, on the banks of the Delaware River opposite Philadelphia, was supposed to be getting better. The state of New Jersey recently began a $175 million bailout plan and a real estate developer is about to start a $1.3 billion redevelopment gamble that includes fancy homes and, of all things, a golf course.
And so Camden's latest explosion of violence, which defies most national trends, is, for all its tragic aspects, also miserably timed. The city's dream of renaissance is being interrupted by a brutal reality, and at the cusp of a supposed economic recovery, the most thriving trade remains crack cocaine.
"This city would collapse without it," said Lt. Frank Cook of the Camden police.
Drugs are thought to be responsible for a vast majority of the city's problems, and the drug trade is picking up, detectives say, with better quality narcotics hitting the streets, big-city street gangs moving in and a new breed of criminals stepping up who are sophisticated enough to provide health benefits for crack dealers.
In a place where poverty is so concentrated - Camden is, essentially, one big blighted neighborhood - the outcome seems inevitable: more drugs, more drug wars, more bodies.
That dark formula is what caught the attention of researchers at Morgan Quitno, a group in Lawrence, Kan., that tracks national crime data. They calculated that Camden had the highest rate of violent crime per capita in 2003 among cities of 75,000 or more. And this year looks no better, with homicides up 20 percent and counting.
"It's not all peaches and cream out here," said Irene Miller, a prostitute who has been working Camden's streets for years. Local officials are close to desperate.
"I feel like I'm in Falluja," said Edwin Figueroa, Camden's police chief. "I don't have enough soldiers. The enemy is out there. And we're fighting the same battle over and over and over again."
No doubt, there are countless lives caught up in this.
Here are five.
Yaya Kirkland used to be a chatterbox. Now she barely coos.
She looks up from her hospital bed, blank and drooling, a tangle of tubes and wires and hoses attached to her as if she is some sort of science project. Her shiny coffee-bean eyes are wide open. Her mother puts a finger next to her lashes. But Yaya doesn't blink. Not once.
Sometimes her nose fills up with mucus and she makes a snorting noise. Sometimes little tears run from the corners of her eyes.
"My baby's in pain," her mother says.
Yaya, whose full name is Yahnajeah, is a 3-year-old casualty of Camden's drug wars. She was bouncing around the back seat of a car on her way home with her mother when a stray bullet fired from the doorway of a housing project drilled through the car's door and into the back of her head.
This happened Oct. 28, at 9:35 p.m., in the Centerville section of town, a drug-infested stretch of rundown row houses and housing projects. Her mother, Nathenia Kirkland, had just picked up cheese fries and fried chicken for dinner.
She heard, crack, crack. Two shots. Saw two flashes.
When she whipped around to check on her daughter, Yaya was slumped over the back seat.
"God, please don't take my baby, please," Ms. Kirkland recalled screaming.
The police didn't think the girl would live. They opened a homicide investigation.
But Yaya held on. She survived six operations and many complications, though it is not clear if she will ever fully recover.
"She's conscious, but she's not conscious," said her great-aunt, Kathryn Blackshear. "She can see but she can't see."
Ms. Kirkland is on her own now, a 26-year-old single mother looking after a wounded child in a city where social service agencies say 80 percent of children are born to single mothers, more than double the national average. She wanted to quit work but could not because she needs to pay the bills. She works at a nursing home folding sheets and wiping noses, and comes home at night to an empty apartment.
"I used to hear my baby playing in her room, she said. "I used to hear Elmo."
She is lonely and angry and frustrated and scared.
"I'm always looking over my shoulder now," she said. "Sometimes, when I'm driving around, I feel like it's me who's about to get shot in the head."
People say they know who the gunman is. But no witnesses will talk. No arrests have been made. In Camden, it's a familiar story.
A Nun's Blessings
Sister Helen Cole is known in North Camden as Sister Charles Bronson.
The other day she was walking down York Street with an Our Lady of Guadelupe pendant swinging from her neck, past once-beautiful peaked-roof houses now encased in burglar bars, past men in hooded sweatshirts mouthing "white horse, white horse," past murals of dead boys with R.I.P. painted below their faces in huge snazzy graffiti letters, when she bumped into a neighbor.
"Hey, Terry," she said. "Just doing a tour of the holy ground."
"Sister," the woman replied, "all Camden is going to be holy ground soon."
When somebody is killed, Sister Helen goes to the spot with a bottle of holy water. She lights a candle. She says a prayer. The spot becomes holy ground. She has turned sidewalks, street corners, porches, alleyways, weed-choked fields and even a Toyota Celica into holy ground. Lately, she has been very busy.
She began this work in 1995 when the mother of a missing girl knocked on the convent's door for help. The girl had been raped and murdered. Sister Helen hasn't looked back since.
"I'm not a seeker, an ambulance chaser," she said. "But I enjoy taking away pain. I hold out my hands and tell people, 'Give me your pain, put it in my hands, let it go.' "
She calls it companioning.
Every year on Good Friday, Sister Helen, a Roman Catholic nun, leads a Stations of the Cross procession through North Camden. People act out scenes from Christ's crucifixion and then stand on the street corners and belt out the names of known drug dealers and pray for them.
"I'm not stupid," Sister Helen said. "I'm not going to go up to these guys and confront them. I value my life."
How does she even know their names?
"We coached them in Little League," she said
Her church, Holy Name, has been running sports programs and social services in North Camden for years. It is one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city, and many houses have an unusual architectural feature: the totally fortified front porch, with burglar bars walling off not just windows and doors but the whole front part of the house. The police call them birdcages, and on many days when the streets are thick with drug dealers, it is the law-abiding citizen sitting behind bars.
Sister Helen, 46, lives amid all this in a convent on State Street with four other nuns. They have a Christmas wreath bound to their porch with three chains.
"The addicts," she explained.
The other day, she dropped in at La Dominicana, a corner store, with the daughter of the man who used to run it.
"This is where the lookout stood," the girl said flatly as she opened the door.
"This is where the robber was," the girl added as she walked in. "And this is where my father got shot."
"More holy ground," Sister Helen said.
One Man's Vision
At the top of Camden City Hall is a saying chiseled into stone: "In a dream I saw a city invincible."
Walt Whitman, Camden's most famous resident, wrote those words in 1860. Randy Primas, Camden's revitalization czar, still believes in them.
Mr. Primas steps to his window on the 13th floor of City Hall and looks out across the rooftops. He doesn't see the killing fields of North Camden where Sister Helen lights her candles. He doesn't see the Camden that is. He sees high-rise condos rising up from the waterfront, and new office towers in front of the Philadelphia skyline, and business and people flocking to downtown instead of fleeing in a trail of taillights when the sun goes down. He sees the Camden that will be, something like the Camden that once was.
"You know, Camden used to make everything from a pen to a battleship," Mr. Primas said. "It was a smokestack town. It had hundreds of factories. People had jobs. It worked."
Mr. Primas, 55, was a popular mayor in the 1980's and is among Camden's select few over the past 20 years not to be indicted. Then he moved away to the suburbs and made a lot of money working for a bank.
Two years ago, he came back to perform miracles. So far, it's been slow going.
He was appointed by the state to be Camden's chief operating officer, in charge of the $175 million bailout plan, with veto power over the mayor and the City Council.
Already, he has had to take the City Council to court three times to force it to approve his plans.
His goal is jobs.
"We've got to give these young men on the corners something to do," he said.
He rattled off a list of businesses that had closed since the 1960's - New York Shipyards, the Haddon book bindery, the Campbell soup factory. He remembered summer days when the produce trucks would line up at the factory and the streets would run red - with tomato juice.
He gave statistics of today's Camden: 20 percent of the city is unemployed; per-capita income is $9,815; half of the residents did not finish high school; one out of 20 graduated from college; 46 percent of children live in poverty.
"That $175 million may sound like a lot of money for this place," Mr. Primas went on. "But it's going to take billions."
Drugs and Real Estate
Kenny Jenkins used to cut an impressive figure in his silk shirts and Versace suits, driving his $60,000 Lincoln Navigator with the $10,000 rims around the Louis Street wasteland where he grew up. According to federal prosecutors, he was one of the biggest dealers in town, raking in $300,000 a week.
Now he is locked up and facing 30 years to life.
Over the past few weeks, in a hushed courtroom in the Camden federal building, prosecutors have tried to methodically build a case against Mr. Jenkins, 36, painting him as the living, breathing, crack-dealing embodiment of Camden's ruin - but with a twist.
After amassing a mountain of cash, prosecutors said, Mr. Jenkins tried to go straight by buying rundown houses, fixing them up and selling them. The problem was, prosecutors said, he defrauded mortgage companies and home buyers every step of the way.
They have called a string of witnesses to detail Mr. Jenkins's rise to power, starting with accounts of his humble beginnings as a high school dropout selling crack at the corner of Louis and Chestnut Streets, one of the city's most notorious intersections, to his emergence as a major player in powdered cocaine.
"You will hear how the profits were staggering at times, and that the cash was spent often as quickly as it came in," said Marc-Philip Ferzan, one of the prosecutors, at the beginning of the trial. "Cristal Champagne at $500 a bottle, expensive cars, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Lincoln Navigators, S.U.V.'s, the finest designer clothes like Versace, Prada, Gucci, jewelry, Rolex watches, gold necklaces, diamond earrings, women."
As one police officer put it, Camden is "the richest poorest city in the country." And at any given moment, the war on drugs is playing out in multiple sites across the city's compact downtown - the federal court, the state court, the methadone clinic, the police station, the prosecutor's office, the county health bureau - all within walking distance of one another, almost like a mini-Olympics for the narcotics game.
But for all the drugs coursing through Camden's veins, there won't be any on display at the Jenkins trial. Despite three years of investigation, federal agents were not able to seize even a dime bag connected to him.
"This is a dope case with no dope," said his defense lawyer, Michael E. Riley. "They don't have any physical evidence to prove Kenny is anything but a legitimate businessman in the home repair business."
Mr. Jenkins, who was convicted of drug dealing in 1998, was not available for comment. The other day he sat in court in a crisp dress shirt, cupping his face, rubbing his shaved head, studying the faces of the witnesses, his old friends.
He was heard only when prosecutors played a tape recorded by an informant.
"There ain't nothing she can say about me," Mr. Jenkins said on the tape, referring to the possibility of his ex-girlfriend's testifying. "What? I sold drugs? They know that."
View From a Police Car
Capt. Harry Leon does not see America winning the war on drugs. His goal is a little smaller." I just try to keep the corner clean where my mama lives," he said.
As the sun sank behind Philadelphia's skyline, across the river but a world away, Captain Leon glided down Federal Street in his sleek black Crown Victoria, a complete mess rolling past his windows: houses half standing, half falling down, littered lots, broken down cars, teenage boys in groups with their middle-school lookouts riding bikes.
"We can suppress but we can't eradicate," said Captain Leon, who has been patrolling Camden for 15 years. A drug dealer once blew up his truck, and after that Captain Leon said his wife "strongly suggested" they move out of Camden. They did.
He said the Camden Police Department constantly shifted its tactics: officers on foot, officers on bikes, officers on horseback, going hard, going soft, going in between.
"But they figure it out," he said.
Today's drug dealers speak in code and use untraceable cellphones and brand their white bags of powder with special stamps to differentiate themselves, he said. The latest craze now is "wet," a marijuana joint rolled in embalming fluid.
Drug crimes and gun crimes are the two top priorities. Last summer Camden's law enforcement agencies, who are often at odds with each other, banded together to form a "shoot team" to investigate nonfatal shootings with the same rigor usually reserved for homicides. So far, they have increased the number of closed cases on aggravated assaults from 18 percent to 45 percent.
"The key is getting people to talk," said Sgt. Eddie Ramos, head of the shoot team. "We'll show up at a gun call and everybody will be standing around saying nothing happened and we'll turn the corner and find a body."
Where the bodies fall is often memorialized. It has become almost an urban cliché. But in Camden the sidewalk memorials are truly inescapable, one after another testifying to the swift current carrying the city's young men away.
During his patrol, Captain Leon stopped by a huge richly detailed mural of a 27-year-old man called "B." He had soft eyes and a little mustache. His face was in the clouds.
"We're going to tear this down," Captain Leon said.
Why?
" 'Cause it glorifies death."
But before he got back into the car, Captain Leon looked up once more at the mural.
"Beautiful though, ain't it?" he said.
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Agree.
Gee im going to go out on a limb here and say camden new jersey has very very strict draconian gun controls laws. am I right or am I right?If you end the war on drugs and the war on the 2cd amendment and pass a actual death penalty law where the convict wont die of old age before his exacution then crime everywhere will drop to record low levels in a matter of weeks but then the corrupt cops and feds and other hangers on wont get thier second income and unchecked power and immunity to all felonys that they all currently enjoy.
Ride with a drug enforcement cop. I've worked with youth on drugs. And nothing infuriates me more than some ignorant ass of a fool who thinks legalizing it is a good idea. These things are poison. They destroy the soul. They turn people into mindless animals, willing to do anything for that next hit, even kill.
If you think legalizing drugs will stop the killing by dealers, then you are the biggest fool of all. Dealers don't kill because drugs are illegal, they kill to eliminate competition in the market.
We will never legalize drugs. What foolish drug company would manufacture a product infinitely more dangerous than cigarettes? The lawyers would be circling every factory. This whole "war on drugs" mantra from the libertarians is just a red herring.
And where is the market if the drugs become legal? Is a homeboy going to compete with Walgreens?
You call me an ignorant ass of a fool, but everything you say can be said and has been said of alcohol, right down to the gangsters machine-gunning speakeasies of their competition. If you had been alive then, you would be telling me sanctimoniously to ride along with some revenue agents, busting illegal moonshine operations, getting shot at, and do I still think that horrible drink should be made legal? Now, alcohol is legal and those crimes of violence are essentially gone. We tried prohibition once, and admitted it was a big mistake. We're trying it again. It's still a big mistake, and people like yourselves cannot distinguish between the problems of drugs, and problems of prohibition.
Incidentally, the first prohibition got us the BATF, the first federal gun control laws (NFA'34), it firmly established the Mafia in America, and got the Kennedy family into politics, thanks to corruption. The Drug War is bringing many more evils than that into every one else's lives.
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but everything you say can be said and has been said of alcohol,
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You ever see someone crawl through broken glass for a shot of bourbon? To put it in terms even a fool libertarian can understand: When demand for a product is so high people will KILL to get it, then others will kill to sell it to them.
Here's what will happen if you legalize drugs: Use will skyrocket. Unemployment will skyrocket. Crime will skyrocket.
And your comments on Alcohol are urban legend. Fewer people died during prohibition than after. Have you looked lately at the number of people killed by drunk drivers in this country? Tell me again that ending prohibition reduced deaths.
So, is it morally superior to legalize a product that will fill your morgues with victims but might reduce high-visibility murders?
Oh, right. The Libertarian mindset: I can do whatever the hell I want and don't you try to stop me, and if someone else dies, well, then they should just hurry up and do it and decrease the surplus population.
The push to legalize drugs is raw, naked evil at work.
No, I wasn't alive in the '20s. Today, they don't have to, because there are liquor stores where such people can buy alcohol (after panhandling some quarters). I have, however, seen people step outside in -20 F weather to catch a smoke during the peak of flu season, because the establishment was banned from allowing smoking indoors.
To put it in terms even a fool libertarian can understand: When demand for a product is so high people will KILL to get it, then others will kill to sell it to them.
Your sense of reason has apparently been warped by rage, or something, so I'll spell it out for you: if it were legal, the addict is free to buy it at a "drug" store, so those who would kill to sell it won't have many customers.
Here's what will happen if you legalize drugs: Use will skyrocket. Unemployment will skyrocket. Crime will skyrocket.
Um, that's what you have in Camden today, with your immoral war being fought.
And your comments on Alcohol are urban legend. Fewer people died during prohibition than after.
With respect to homicides, you are either mistaken or lying.
Source: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/?article=miron.prohibition.alcohol
Note that the homicide rates peak with law enforcement dollars both towards the end of the Prohibition, and rise again as the War On (some) Drugs begins in earnest. Maybe it's just coincidence - but, maybe it's not. In any case your assertion is disproven, with respect to homicides. Does this fact change your worldview whatsoever?
Have you looked lately at the number of people killed by drunk drivers in this country? Tell me again that ending prohibition reduced deaths.
Drunk driving deaths are a separate issue, and anyway drunk driving is still illegal. Furthermore, vehicular homicide is still reflected in the overall homicide rate. (In order to make the case you intended to make, DD would have to be decriminalized, which I am not arguing. That's called a straw man argument on your part.)
So, is it morally superior to legalize a product that will fill your morgues with victims but might reduce high-visibility murders?
Having seen the data, let's turn the question around: Is it morally superior to keep a prohibition in place, when there are not one but two cases in which the imposition of a prohibition has increased the homicide rate? (Who is the one who wants to decrease the surplus population, re: your argument just below?)
Oh, right. The Libertarian mindset: I can do whatever the hell I want and don't you try to stop me, and if someone else dies, well, then they should just hurry up and do it and decrease the surplus population.
Another straw man argument. Used by dishonest people when honest arguments don't work or can't be found.
The push to legalize drugs is raw, naked evil at work.
On the contrary, the War On (some) Drugs is.
And I'm just this ignorant ass of a fool libertarian who can point to places like Colorado with the "Make my day" law, or Vermont and Alaska where you don't even need a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and these promised evils just simply don't come to pass (except at gun-free schools like Columbine). Still there are plenty of people who are calling on the prohibition of guns to expand and become complete, and they cite places where guns are already illegal, but which are either criminal hellholes (e.g. Washington D.C.) or sites of famous massacres (e.g. Columbine H.S.) to make their case.
8. Miron and Zwiebel (1991) show that deaths due to alcoholism, which probably included deaths from overdoses or accidental poisonings, soared during Prohibition relative to other proxies.
The lower the price, the less the crime; and the price might be so low that panhandling and can-collecting cover it, as appears to be the case with the legal addictive drug alcohol.
My uncle drank Listerine for the alcohol content when he couldn't get booze.
"80% of births are to unwed mothers." Thanks, LBJ, for creating the "Great Society." It has given us more than you ever thought it would! (sarcasm off)
There are jobs wherever there is justice, and there is no justice here.
A major point, said better than I have been able to produce.
And in light of the graphs I posted, have you changed your position any at all? (Or, are you in the "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts" stage, like liberals are with global warming and the benefits of gun control?)
Gee .. pulled this one out of the blue didn't ya
I’ve lived less than 5 miles away from Camden my whole life in Haddon Twp. I am near Cherry Hill, Haddonfield, Collingswood - all very nice, humble, small towns... New Jersey suburbs. All these towns are located right outside the warzones of Camden, seperated by a very small thoroughway but somehow, remain quiet, family-oriented towns. Towns where everyone knows each other and their families, have kids that play on the local soccer team, etc... Anyone living in these towns in my generation have been told to stay away from Camden and for good reason. All you have to do is look at the numbers to realize just how bad it is. One thing I think is crazy is how Rt. 130 seperates the violence, madness, killing, drug dealing.... from these very idealistic towns. One thing is for sure, they do a great job keeping that shit out of my town. You cross over Rt. 130 into a different world. Also, working at a local hotel, I can’t tell you how many people come in at the point of tears because they got lost in Camden on the way to our hotel.
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