NYT: Camden's Streets Go From Mean to America's Most Dangerous City, Liberalism's Showcase

New York Times ^ | December 29, 2004 | JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

[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.

[N. Theknow]

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.

Oh, yeah! No guts to confront criminals but let a policeman shoot a drug dealer and there is Hell to pay.

[wku man]

Wow...looks like a Hip-Hop Utopia. The teens and early 20s I work with would look at the pics and think it looked like a pretty cool place...just like the Tacoma, Seattle and Portland sewers they come from.

Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!

[Safetgiver]

Corrected text: Classic model of government by Democrats organized crime, aka MOB......Reading, PA was once run by the mob. Since they have gotten out, the place is about one step above Camden.

[t_skoz]

I love Detroit... well, the history of Detroit.

I go to Ann Arbor many times a year to visit friends, and once I asked my friend "take me to Detroit!" He asked, what the hell would I want to go there for? But he took me anyway. One of my hobbies is taking pictures of graffitti, and Detroit proved to be fertile ground. But my poor friend almost had a heart attack as I kept making him stop the car while I got out to take pictures in what were obviously some of the worst neighborhoods I'd ever been in (and I'm from Rochester NY!).

I had heard how bad it is there, my dad even told me not to go there, but I had to check out the home of the mighty MC5, The Stooges, home of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, the home of the Motown Records sounds, the factories of the great war machines of WWII...

It was horrible. Every 3rd building was burned, locked up, bombed out, destroyed, delapidated, or otherwise ruined. I'd never seen anything like it. Two rock&roll guys in an Oldsmobile, and we were the only white people I saw for miles.

That was an awesome website, thank you so much for linking it.

[frgoff]

---
Nobody says legalizing drugs would create a utopia. It would, however, stop the war and the killing ... if that would be something you'd possibly want to do.
---

Really? And when the junkie doesn't have the money for his fix because he can't hold down a job? Dealers aren't the only ones who mug, steal and kill for drugs.

Tell you what. Ride with your city's drug enforcement cops for a day. Then, after you've seen the malnourished children (mom sold the food stamps for crack), and the abused children (Mom pimped her daughter for drug money) you come back and tell me how making this evil, destructive substance legal makes these problems go away.

[Dan from Michigan]

Per capita - That murder race is about twice the rate of DETROIT.

[Dan from Michigan]

race=rate.

[JimRed]

Legalize the drugs...that'll make it all better.

< /sarcasm >

[JimRed]

I should have read down farther first...

[Old Professer]

All in the search for culture we career madly whilst gathering in our desperate wake the foreign flotsam of troubled waters.

[Old Professer]

"Two treats in one...?"

[JimRed]

Hmmm... Big construction involves big unions. Now, who gets a piece of the money from the big unions?

Uhhhhh....DEMOCRATS?

[coloradan]

I didn't say it would make those problems go away, Mr. Straw Man Argument, I said it would stop the killing. Maybe not 100% of the killing, but probably 95% of the killing. Please re-read my post. Most of the killings have to do with dealing, not with addicts trying to get money. As it is now with the prohibition, you have the moms selling their food stamps for crack, parents pimping their daughters for drug money, AND murderous gang violence killing many people each year. Do you want to stop none of these things by keeping things the way they are, or do you want to make a dent at all? (And, I'll just mention some fo the collateral damage to innocents on the War On (some) Drugs: wrong-address no-knock raids, innocent people shot in their own beds, testilying, asset forfeiture of people's legitimately earned life savings, the militarization of our police forces, escalation of the War On Guns, violent criminals released from prison to make room for mandatory minimum non-violent drug offenders, intrusive banking laws... it goes on and on.) Insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.

[governsleastgovernsbest]

Could be, though as you know The Wire is set in Baltimore. I think it's a great series, and am surprised it hasn't received more attention.

[dakine]

My sister was born in Camden, a lot has changed since 1960...yikes!

[durasell]

Camden is what happens when the jobs vanish. It's pretty much the future.

[Coleus]

Don't worry,

 

there is midnight basketball which will cure all the ills of the inner city. 

 

the abbott v. burke supreme court decision regarding parity in school funding in inner cities has solved all the education problems with our inner-city youth.

 

Don't worry, Regis Philbin's co-host's father, Joe Ripa, a union boss, is a Democrat Freeholder in Camden County.

 

the NJ State Police started to patrol Camden years ago to reduce the crime rates and even  Governor Whitless joined in the fun with law enforcement, the citizens of Camden can sleep better at night knowing Christie is on patrol doing photo ops patting down black youths.

 

A 1996 photograph of New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman frisking a black man during a drug sweep in Camden shows the great strides white women have made in cracking the so-called 'Old Boys Network.'

[af_vet_1981]

Where is Bob Dylan when you need him ...

[af_vet_1981]

What is the difference between the Democrats and the Mob ?

[Coleus]

Another Thieving Dirtbag Done In by the Second Amendment!
	Posted by Coleus to Lonesome in Massachussets; scottybk On News/Activism 11/28/2004 3:05:05 PM EST · 59 of 63 The trial took place in Camden, the county seat of Camden County.  The crime happened elsewhere in the county probably in Collingswood or Merchantville Camden is a Toilet, their mayor was sent to prison and the state police had to patrol the city, the RINO's in the state tried to use gentrification as an excuse to build an aquarium in Camden only to find that nobody was going down there because it's in a toilet and to further add insult to injury, this aquarium which is already in the RED is actually closed until May 2005 for expansion!!  As if that is NOT enough, where  the RINOs did NOT  learn a lesson, these same idiot loser Republican RINO Legislators had the Battleship NJ docked in Camden too instead of putting it in Bayonne where most of the NYC Metro population has easy accessibility to it.  That too is losing money and is in the RED. In NJ you can own a gun and not use it if someone is robbing your home.  As we saw, if the robber is unarmed, a NJ resident will be charged if he shoots the robber. Only in NJ. Franklin man charged in death Wednesday, April 28, 2004 Resident accused of shooting burglary suspect By TIM ZATZARINY JR. and GENE VERNACCHIO Courier-Post Staff FRANKLIN Burglars broke into Robert J. Clark Jr.'s home a year ago. So when he saw two men stealing his all-terrain vehicle from his shed Monday night, he grabbed his gun. When it was all over, Clark, 33, had shot and killed William Hamilton, 39, of Clementon as he and another man broke into the backyard shed at Clark's Grant Avenue home, authorities said. Prosecutors believe Clark took justice into his own hands and have charged him with murder. He faces the possibility of life in prison, if convicted. But a neighbor who tried to calm Clark moments after the shooting, said Clark thought he saw the suspects point a gun at him. Mike Moore, 43, said when Clark saw the two men from a kitchen window, he tried to call 9-1-1 three times but his cordless phone had died the night before. He also tried to trip his home alarm, but it didn't work either. "He then got his gun, opened up his side door," Moore said. "Slowly, without turning the light on, he shouted `freeze.' The one guy turned and pointed at him. Bobby thought he had a gun and he shot him twice." From his own front step, Moore said he saw the second suspect, Dwain Jones, who is a neighbor, running across Clark's front yard as Clark fired three shots toward him. "By that time I'm in the street and Bobby tells me he shot and thinks he might have killed a guy in his back yard," Moore said. Authorities said the shooting took place shortly after 10 p.m. They provided a similar account to Moore's about the events that night and offered additional details. Authorities said Clark fired at Hamilton with a 9mm Taurus, a handgun he legally owns, hitting him in the right shoulder. The bullet exited through the left side of Hamilton's chest, killing him. Authorities said Clark chased Jones, 42, as he fired three shots into the air. Jones, who lives a quarter-mile from Clark, fled to his house, where he was arrested Tuesday morning as the Gloucester County SWAT team surrounded his home. Clark is charged with murder and second-degree charges of aggravated assault and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. He was released after posting $50,000 full cash bail. An initial court date had not been set by late Tuesday. New Jersey law does not allow the use of deadly force to protect personal property. Deadly force can be used only in self-defense, defense of another person or protection of one's home. "We cannot allow individuals to take the law into their own hands," Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean F. Dalton said during a news conference Tuesday. "Mr. Clark had several options available to him instead of shooting Mr. Hamilton." Dalton said authorities don't believe either suspect had a gun. Clark's attorney, Michael Pinsky, did not return a phone call for comment. Dalton said he was unsure of the exact relationship between Hamilton and Jones, but that the two planned in advance to steal Clark's ATV. Hamilton's pickup truck was parked nearby as the two men burglarized the shed, Dalton said. The truck was found in front of Jones' house when he was arrested. Jones, of 2482 Grant Ave., is charged with third-degree counts of burglary and theft. He was being held in the Gloucester County Jail on $5,000 full cash bail. Jones faces a maximum 10-year prison sentence if convicted. Hamilton had recently been indicted by a Gloucester County grand jury on a burglary charge out of Woodbury Heights, Dalton said. He and another man are accused of breaking into the Heritage's Dairy Store on Glassboro Road in December. An autopsy showed he died from the gunshot wound, according to the Gloucester County Medical Examiner's Office. Clark, who was home alone Monday night, had been the victim of a burglary about a year ago, but the case has not been solved, said Franklin Police Chief Michael DiGiorgio. Police arrived moments after Monday's shooting, he said. Dalton said Clark should have waited for authorities before grabbing his gun. "The wrong thing to do is to intervene because when you intervene, someone is going to get hurt," Dalton said. "In this case, someone died."