It's morning meeting time at Our Place Day Services, a day center
for adults with disabilities, housed in a small concrete and glass building on
Lovers Lane in Slinger, Wis.
About 30 people are gathered here, around a long table, reciting the pledge of
allegiance. One man paces alongside the table, another sits in a wheelchair a
few feet away. There's a woman holding a baby in her lap and a friendly dog — a
goldendoodle — wandering around greeting people with a sniff and a lick.
A modest operation based north of Milwaukee, on Interstate 43, Our Place serves
as a safe place for people with severe cognitive disabilities to spend their
days and learn news skills while the family members who usually care for them
are at work.
Clients at Our Place can participate in fun activities — do art or go bowling
with staff from the center — and they also work on specific skills like money
management or cooking. The center provides the sort of crucial support services
that many people are concerned will no longer be offered if Republicans proceed
with their planned cuts to Medicaid.
On this Monday morning the clients at Our Place are sharing their goals — big
and small. One man wants to finish a mosaic he's working on, while a woman down
the table says she hopes to go to the movies with a friend someday.
CAMDEN, N.J. — Two gruesome murders of children last month — a
toddler decapitated, a 6-year-old stabbed in his sleep — served as reminders of
this city’s reputation as the most dangerous in America. Others can be found
along the blocks of row houses spray-painted “R.I.P.,” empty liquor bottles
clustered on their porches in memorial to murder victims.
The police acknowledge that they have all but ceded these streets to crime, with
murders on track to break records this year. And now, in a desperate move to
regain control, city officials are planning to disband the Police Department.
The reason, officials say, is that generous union contracts have made it
financially impossible to keep enough officers on the street. So in November,
Camden, which has already had substantial police layoffs, will begin terminating
the remaining 273 officers and give control to a new county force. The move,
officials say, will free up millions to hire a larger, nonunionized force of 400
officers to safeguard the city, which is also the nation’s poorest.
Hardly a political battle of the last several years has been fiercer than the
one over the fate of public sector unions. But Camden’s decision to remake
perhaps the most essential public service for a city riven by crime underscores
how communities are taking previously unimaginable steps to get out from under
union obligations that built up over generations.
Though the city is solidly Democratic, the plan to put the Police Department out
of business has not prompted the wide public outcry seen in the union battles in
Chicago, Ohio or Wisconsin, in part because many residents have come to resent a
police force they see as incompetent, corrupt and doing little to make their
streets safe.
A police union has sued to stop the move, saying it is risking public safety on
an “unproven” idea. But many residents, community groups and elected officials
say that the city is simply out of money, out of options, out of patience.
“There’s no alternative, there’s no Plan B,” the City Council president, Frank
Moran, said. “It’s the only option we have.”
Faced with tight budgets, many communities across the country are considering
regionalizing their police departments, along with other services like
firefighting, libraries and schools. Though some governments have rejected the
idea for fear of increasing police response time, the police in Camden —
population 77,000 — are already so overloaded they no longer respond to property
crimes or car accidents that do not involve injuries.
The new effort follows a push by New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, a
Republican, and Democratic leaders in the Legislature to encourage cities and
towns to regionalize government services. They maintain that in a new era of
government austerity, it is no longer possible for each community to offer a
full buffet of government services, especially with a new law prohibiting
communities from raising property taxes more than 2 percent a year.
Most municipalities have so far remained committed to local traditions, fearing
a loss of community identity, but officials in Camden County say they expect
others will soon feel compelled to follow the city’s example.
Camden’s budget was $167 million last year, and of that, the budget for the
police was $55 million. Yet the city collected only $21 million in property
taxes. It has relied on state aid to make up the difference, but the state is
turning off the spigot. The city has imposed furloughs, reduced salaries and
trash collection, and increased fees. But the businesses the city desperately
needs to attract to generate more revenue are scared off by the crime.
“We cannot move the city forward unless we address public safety,” the mayor,
Dana L. Redd, said. “This is about putting boots on the ground.”
Even union officials acknowledge that the contract is rich with expensive
provisions. For example, officers earn an additional 4 percent for working a day
shift, and an additional 10 percent for the shift starting at 9:30 p.m. They
earn an additional 11 percent for working on a special tactical force or an
anticrime patrol.
Salaries range from about $47,000 to $81,000 now, not including the shift
differentials or additional longevity payments of 3 percent to 11 percent for
any officer who has worked five years or more. Officials say they anticipate
salaries for the new force will range from $47,000 to $87,000.
In 2009, as the economy was putting a freeze on municipal budgets even in
well-off communities, the police here secured a pay increase of 3.75 percent.
And liberal sick time and family-leave policies have created an unusually high
absentee rate: every day, nearly 30 percent of the force does not show up. (A
typical rate elsewhere is in the single digits.)
“How do I go to the community and say ‘I’m doing everything I can to help you
fight crime’ when some of my officers are working better hours than bankers?”
the police chief, J. Scott Thomson, asked.
Chief Thomson, who is well regarded nationally, is expected to lead the new
force. Though Camden County covers 220 square miles and includes 37
municipalities, the proposal calls for a division focused exclusively on the
nine-square-mile city of Camden.
Camden, in the shadow of Philadelphia’s glimmering towers, once had a thriving
industrial base — a shipyard, Campbell Soup and RCA plants along the waterfront.
About 60,000 jobs were lost when those companies moved or shifted them
elsewhere.
Nearly one in five of its residents is unemployed, and Broadway, once the main
shopping strip, is now a canyon of abandoned buildings.
The burned-out shell of one house, a landmark built by one of the city’s
founding families, has become a drug den.
This month, a heroin user there demanded that a passer-by give her some privacy
to use it. “Can you show me a little respect?” she said. “I’m in a park.”
Camden reorganized its Police Department in 2008 and had a lower homicide rate
for two years. Then the recession forced layoffs, reducing the force by about
100 officers.
The city has employed other crime-fighting tactics — surveillance cameras,
better lighting, curfews for children — but the number of murders has risen
again: at 48 so far this year, it is on pace to break the record, 58.
The murder rate so far this year is above 6 people per 10,000. By contrast, New
York City’s rate is just over one-third of a person per 10,000 residents.
Many of the drug users come to Camden from elsewhere in the county, getting off
the light-rail system to buy from the drug markets along what police call Heroin
Highway in the neighborhood of North Camden.
“That is cocaine, that is heroin, that is crack,” Bryan Morton, a community
activist, said recently as he used his car key to flick away empty bags while
his 3-year-old daughter played nearby. This summer, Mr. Morton tried to set up
the city’s first Little League in 15 years in nearby Pyne Poynt Park. Drug users
colonized even the portable toilets set up for the players, littering them with
empty glassine drug packets and needle caps.
Like other residents, he is resentful of the police union for making it so
prohibitive to hire more officers. “The contract is creating a public safety
crisis,” Mr. Morton said. “More officers could change the complexion of this
neighborhood.”
John Williamson, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, blamed the city
for creating the problems by shifting officers onto patrols, where they receive
extra pay, from administrative positions. He said he was open to negotiation but
believed that the city simply wanted to get rid of the contract.
“They want to go back to a 1930s atmosphere where employees and officers have
absolutely no rights to redress bad management and poor working conditions,” he
said.
Under labor law, the current contract will remain in effect if the new county
force hires more than 49 percent of the current officers. So county officials
say they will hire fewer than that. Nevertheless, they expect that the new force
will eventually become unionized.
Officials say that simply adding officers will not make all the difference,
given the deep suspicion many residents harbor toward the police. As the chief
and his deputy drove through the Whitman Park neighborhood this month, people
sitting on their stoops stood up to shake their fists and shout obscenities at
them. When police officers arrested a person suspected of dealing drugs in a
house on a narrow street in North Camden last year, residents set upon their
cars and freed the prisoner.
The new county officers will be brought in 25 at a time, while the existing
force is still in place, and trained on neighborhood streets, in the hopes that
they can become part of their fabric and regain trust.
Ian K. Leonard, a member of the Camden County Board of Freeholders and the state
political director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said
he did not blame the union officials who won the provisions. But he said he
believed that the contracts were helping to perpetuate the “most dangerous city
in America” title that he and others hate.
“If you add police, it will give us a fighting chance,” Mr. Leonard said.
“People need a fighting chance.”
President Obama, who came to office promising transparency and
adherence to the rule of law, has become the first president to claim the legal
authority to order an American citizen killed without judicial involvement, real
oversight or public accountability.
That, regrettably, was the most lasting impression from a major address on
national security delivered last week by Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.
There were parts of the speech worth celebrating — starting with Mr. Holder’s
powerful discussion of why trying most terrorists in civilian courts is best for
punishing them and safeguarding America. But we are deeply concerned about his
rejection of oversight and accountability when it comes to killing American
citizens who are suspected of plotting terrorist acts.
A president has the right to order lethal force against conventional enemies
during conventional war, or against unconventional enemies in unconventional
wars. But when it comes to American citizens, there must be compelling evidence
that the threat the citizen poses is imminent and that capturing the citizen is
not a realistic option.
The case that has brought the issue to international attention is the Sept. 30,
2011, drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen,
who United States officials say was part of Al Qaeda’s command structure.
Another American was killed in the strike, and Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son,
also an American citizen, was killed in an attack two weeks later.
The killings touched off a storm of criticism. Mr. Awlaki’s father tried to sue
the government, which used the “national secrets” defense to have the case
tossed out. But the administration has refused to acknowledge that the killing
took place or that there is in fact a policy about “targeted killings” of
Americans.
It has even refused to acknowledge the existence of a Justice Department memo
providing legal justification for killing American citizens, even though that
memo has been reported by The Times and others. It is beyond credibility that
Mr. Obama ordered the Awlaki killing without getting an opinion from the
department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Even President George W. Bush took the
trouble to have lawyers in that office cook up a memo justifying torture.
The administration intended Mr. Holder’s speech to address the criticism and
provide a legal argument for the policy, but it was deeply inadequate in
important ways.
Mr. Holder agreed that killing an American citizen requires that he “poses an
imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” that capture “is
not feasible,” that the target has military value, that other people are not
targeted intentionally, that the potential “collateral damage” not be excessive
and that the weapons used “will not inflict unnecessary suffering.”
But he gave no inkling what the evidence was in the Awlaki case, and the
administration did not provide a way in which anyone other than the people who
gave the order could review whether the standards were met. Mr. Awlaki made
tapes for Islamist Web sites that justified armed attacks on the United States
by Muslims. But was he just spouting off, or actively plotting or supporting
attacks?
All Mr. Holder did say was that the president could order such a killing without
any judicial review and that any such operation would have “robust”
Congressional oversight because the administration would brief Congressional
leaders. He also said the administration provided Congress with the legal
underpinnings for such killings.
In the Awlaki case, we do not know whether that notification was done in advance
or after the fact, if it was done at all. We do know the administration has not
given Congress the legal memo with the underlying justification for killing
American citizens, because Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, was asking Mr. Holder for it just the other day.
Perhaps most disturbing, Mr. Holder utterly rejected any judicial supervision of
a targeted killing.
We have said that a decision to kill an American citizen should have judicial
review, perhaps by a special court like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, which authorizes eavesdropping on Americans’ communications.
Mr. Holder said that could slow a strike on a terrorist. But the FISA court
works with great speed and rarely rejects a warrant request, partly because the
executive branch knows the rules and does not present frivolous or badly argued
cases. In Mr. Awlaki’s case, the administration had long been complaining about
him and tracking him. It made an earlier attempt to kill him.
Mr. Holder said such operations require high levels of secrecy. That is obvious,
but the FISA court operates in secret, and at least Americans are assured that
some legal authority not beholden to a particular president or political party
is reviewing such operations.
Mr. Holder argued in his speech that judicial process and due process guaranteed
by the Constitution “are not one and the same.” This is a straw man. The
judiciary has the power to say what the Constitution means and make sure the
elected branches apply it properly. The executive acting in secret as the
police, prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner is the antithesis of due
process.
The administration should seek a court’s approval before killing an American
citizen, except in the sort of “hot pursuit” that justifies the police shooting
of an ordinary suspect. There should be consequences in the event of errors —
which are, tragically, made, and are the great risk. And the administration
should publish the Office of Legal Counsel memo. We cannot image why Mr. Obama
would want to follow the horrible example set by Mr. Bush in withholding such
vital information from the public.
