posted on Jan, 19 2011 @ 01:27 AM
reply to post by Enclave
I grew up near Camden and have been there a bunch. It was a disaster in the '70s. We used to joke that a great business to start-up would be
selling razor-wire in Camden.
I'm not so sure that letting the police go is an unreasonable thing to do. Nothing has worked in Camden for 40 years. Dozens of administrations,
tons of cash (the Camden Aquarium was supposed to make Camden some kind of vacation Mecca). It is high time we realized that many of these cities
are simply dead and look to find ways to get people relocated to different, safer places to live, even if they are huge trailer parks. Nothing
could be worse than living in Camden. A kid born there has very little opportunity.
These cities are dead because we let them die. We propped them up, allowed the state and city governments to become the employers of choice, let the
taxes go up, imposed business hostile regulations and did absolutely nothing to attract jobs to them. Folks sat back over a 40 year period and
watched the city decline and were either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Policing Camden is doing nothing but forestalling the inevitable and that is an uninhabited urban wasteland. Is that a shame? Perhaps, I'm not
sure. What is a shame and an outrage is that the government and the people of both New Jersey and Camden allowed it to happen. Whats more of a
shame is our thinking that having a few more police on the streets is going to do something for Camden. They could exponentially increase the number
of police and the city would continue to decline.
Its time to put a fork into cities like Camden and Detroit and seriously talk about moving the people somewhere where they can have some reasonable
chance of a normal life. It ain't going to happen in Camden.