It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Thursday, June 11th.

New York City Council Speaker Cory Johnson is saying he wants to follow the lead of the Minneapolis City Council,

which has a majority who have now pledged to disband their current police department as it now exists. Here in New York,

Speaker Johnson says let's re-envision and reimagine what policing looks like in New York City.

As it turns out, there may be a model already in place close to home. It's Camden.

In southern New Jersey, if you don't know Camden, it's right across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.

The department there has recently been disbanded and recreated. We should say not everyone thinks

it's a model of progressive reform, but now we'll take a closer

look at what Camden did and how it might or might not be a model for New York and other places

with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Alison Steele, who has reported on it.

Alison, thanks so much for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you so much for having me.

So in 2013, the Camden City Police Force was disbanded and replaced by a force that reports to the county.

What led to that drastic a move in 2013?

The major difference between the conversations that are happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere right now and what happened in Camden was that it wasn't really prompted by a public request or outcry for police reform.

There was a major budget shortfall that year from the state, which led to the layoffs of about half of the police reform. There was a major budget shortfall that year from the state, which led to the

layoffs of about half of the police force in Camden, New Jersey. This was a very dark time

for the city. Violent crimes spiraled. They had their highest number of homicides ever that

year in 2012, 67 homicides for a city of

under 80,000 people. Following this, county leaders and some others pushed for the creation of this

county force, which would allow them to essentially dissolve the Camden Police Department and rehire it from the ground up.

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