CAMDEN, N.J. – To Scott Thomson, changing the culture of policing in America is a relatively simple process.It’s just not an easy one.Thomson led a tumultuous police department makeover in Camden, New Jersey — a poor city of mostly brown and black residents just across the river from Philadelphia — in 2013.
After state officials disbanded the old department and started anew, Thomson transformed policing in Camden from the law-and-order, lock-‘em-up approach of the 1990s to a holistic, do-no-harm philosophy that’s put the long-maligned city in the spotlight during the national reckoning over race and police brutality.While police elsewhere clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters outraged by the latest death of a black man detained by.