Personally, I think that the above the law culture has more to do with the current situation than nearly anything else. Police don't hold police accountable to the law. There needs to be some way to change the fact that officers mostly act with impunity and only get called to the carpet for major offenses.
But, if you read the article you realize that the data is 3 years old and inconclusive: "That might be the case with Camden’s homicide drop, which, while encouraging, has hardly transformed the city’s overall numbers. “It’s progress, it’s not success,” Thomson said. “We still have extreme challenges that keep us up at night and spring us out of bed in the morning.”
Indeed, Camden’s violent crime rate in 2017 remained dire enough to place the city at number four on Neighborhood Scout’s annual list of America’s most dangerous cities. The number of nonfatal shooting hit incidents has dropped 45 percent since 2012—but is back up in 2017 from last year’s levels. Meanwhile, aggravated assaults with a firearm have gotten more frequent in the past three years.
The numbers themselves can be potentially misleading: Homicide rates, for example, aren’t necessarily a complete measure of urban violence. Just because fewer people are dying from gunshot wounds doesn’t mean fewer people are getting shot: It could also mean they’re getting better treatment, faster. One of Thomson’s Camden policies, nicknamed “Scoop and Go,” may be at work here, which mandates officers to personally drive victims to the hospital if ambulance wait times are too long. That saves lives, without really addressing the source of the violence itself. (Another possible factor: More victims are just getting to the hospital faster by calling an Uber.)"
