Secure the city,revitalize the zone: Smart urbanization in Camden,New Jersey

Abstract

“Smart city” agendas of information technology-driven governance are often aligned with neoliberal urban revitalization efforts, including the creation of new districts to attract multinational knowledge and innovation-focused industries. The redevelopment of Camden, New Jersey is typical of this, but exceptional as well. To attract over $2 billion in investment in specific zones, a citywide, multi-instrument surveillance network complemented a technologically-mediated community policing agenda. Camden’s “smart city” effort secured the area, controlling the circulation of residents and their use of the city, prioritizing the flow of capital into spatially-bounded zones. As these “smart” surveillance plans for urban revitalization become more common, critically engaging with the, in Camden’s case, policing and surveillance strategies underlying said zones is necessary to understanding the ongoing, evolving relationship between global enterprise and municipal governance. Over its first five years, the success of the surveillance-driven, community policing strategy in reducing crime was mixed, but it did succeed in shifting the narrative of Camden from disenfranchised to ready for business. Contrasting the reinvestment in premium districts with the installation of a citywide digitized security apparatus presents an opportunity to investigate the spatial, infrastructural, and militaristic context within which the rhetoric of and technologies of the smart city are deployed.

Keywords

Infrastructure military urbanism smart city surveillance urban revitalization

Introduction

In October 2015, then-United States President Barack Obama spoke at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago, Illinois, where he highlighted efforts Camden, New Jersey made in data-driven policing (Obama, 2015). Camden was cast as prototype for innovative community policing strategies reliant on multi-instrument digital surveillance. Securing the city from drug dealing and criminal gangs, lowering crime in general, and murders specifically, necessitated outfitting the city with new, automated, computational, and algorithmic systems of cybernetic control (Krivy, 2016) to augment police officers on foot and in patrol cars. Many of these policing technologies and tactics mirrored those used in the United States military’s counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (Petraeus, 2006), part of the ongoing militarization of cities worldwide (Graham, 2010).

A month before Obama’s speech, in September 2015, alongside the Delaware River in what was once Camden’s industrial core, Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, joined local politicians, real estate developers, and corporate leaders in announcing an $800 million waterfront redevelopment project as the cornerstone of nearly $2 billion in public and private investment in Camden (City of Camden, 2015a; Sheridan, 2016). This effort intended to signal Camden’s resurgence after decades of decline. The districts of this new economy were clustering in formerly industrial areas: the South Waterfront where shipbuilding occurred, the Central Waterfront near downtown where manufacturing and warehousing took place, and alongside a freeway interchange in the Gateway District, land most recently used by the Campbell’s Soup company to manufacture soup. Like many industrial-era US cities, Camden was organized around enterprise that, by the 2000s, largely did not exist; little to no new business replaced what the city lost in the 1970s and 1980s (Gilette, 2006). The 21st century, globally-minded redevelopment project Governor Christie announced aimed to change this, bringing jobs and enterprise back to the city, building new skyscrapers amid new street grids and updated municipal infrastructure.

Camden’s example of urban revitalization was not unique in terms of how it sought to create “a city with a city” (Steele, 2017) through tax breaks and infrastructural incentives. However, this paper argues that Camden’s application of a citywide militarized surveillance and policing system was exceptional in vision and execution and points to new avenues of digitally-driven municipal governance agendas. As a means of securing the terrain for outside investment, Camden employed data-driven policing, where officers on the street operated in tandem with a control room monitoring the city. Deploying a citywide surveillance network was intended to shift perception of Camden away from what Rolling Stone magazine called “Apocalypse, New Jersey” (Tabbi, 2013) to a safe, secure, and promising place to invest capital and locate large corporate enterprise.

Ensuring the success of revitalization through the renovation of dilapidated areas, surveillance, and enforcement of conduct has been a core component of urban regeneration efforts since the 1980s (Raco, 2003). These processes of securing a city worked to “ensur[e] that new urban spaces are safe and are seen to be safe” (Raco, 2003: 1870, italics in the original). The need for a city to be perceived as safe is noteworthy and reflects the Camden case, where the installation of surveillance networks established real estate development and attracted new business before crime levels dropped. Unlike in earlier eras of urban regeneration, where enclaves of global capitalism received distinctly more security than their surrounding neighborhoods (see, for instance, Davis, 2006; Easterling, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Sorkin, 1992), Camden reversed and amplified the strategy, securing the city to create the conditions for transnational enterprise to invest in targeted zones including the waterfront shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Camden’s waterfront with the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and Philadelphia in the background. Much of the area in view will be transformed by over $800 million in new development. May 2016. Photo by author.

The research presented here draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources covering the actors involved in Camden’s revitalization, focusing in particular on the implementation of the new policing and surveillance regime. The research draws on city, county, and state economic development policy documents, city and county planning documents, specifically around the transformation of the police force as well as the redevelopment of the waterfront, press statements from the city, county and the waterfront developer, Liberty Property Trust, reportage from local news sources, annual statements from Camden’s public–private planning and economic development partner, Cooper’s Ferry Partnership, and critiques of the Camden County police force from the New Jersey American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Additionally, the research included four one-week fieldwork sessions spread across 2016 and 2017 involving windshield surveys and on-foot investigation of the city, ethnographic observation, in-person interviews with a county government official, the leader of a local community development corporation, a policy advocacy and political transparency organization, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, discussion with the city’s public–private urban planning and economic development partner, discussion with neighborhood-based community organizations as well as professors and staff at Rutgers University–Camden, and conversations on the streets with Camden’s residents.

This essay charts the logic of revitalization that propelled Camden’s “smart city,” militarized security strategy, as this effort was considered the primary factor in setting the stage for the city’s current, if highly uneven, transformation (Director of Communications, 2016). Through its case study, this paper argues that the city’s effort at revitalization was predicated upon a surveillance-first community policing strategy that would secure the city in advance of new enterprise and then, potentially, new residents. As discussed in the analysis section, while the surveillance systems functioned as expected, they did not reduce citywide crime as anticipated. The paper concludes by arguing that the “smart city” digital surveillance systems and community policing strategies operated not to limit or reduce existing socio-economic fractures within the city; instead, in facilitating zone-based revitalization, Camden’s smart urbanization produced a new fragmentation within an already acutely disenfranchised city.

Smart urbanization and the logic of digitized surveillance underlying revitalization

Literature on “smart cities” and smart urbanization more generally frames the implications of Camden’s various forms of surveillance as a matter of governmentality and social control through digital augmentation of municipal governance. In a smart city, control is maintained not only “through the state’s legislative, executive and judiciary powers, reproduced in the daily operations of economic and labour relations, or upheld via the force of customs, traditions and other social norms” (Krivy, 2016: 11), it is also enforced through the constant, automated flow of data. In Camden’s case, data flows underpinned its security and revitalization strategy, privileging a particular logic of trickle-down economic growth that largely excluded existing city residents, at least in its early stages.

Conceptualizing the role of “smart” security as a factor of urban revitalization necessitates bridging literature on smart cities with literature on military urbanism (Graham, 2010) and the military origins of much surveillance systems and policing practices in the US (Balko, 2014). In Camden, the technologies and strategies of the US military—more typically deployed both in theaters of war, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in global cities beset by terrorism, such as New York or London—enforce what geographer Stephen Graham (2010) terms “military urbanism” in a poor, legacy US city. These military technologies and strategies, designed to support counterinsurgency battles against of foreign enemy soldiers and control of civilian bystanders in a war zone, form the basis for Camden’s smart urbanization. Underlying this turn to digitized surveillance is the ongoing militarization of policing. Federal programs have been used to arm law enforcement with “military arsenals” while the training of officers “encourages them to adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality” (ACLU, 2015: 2–3). When city streets are treated like a battleground, the tactics of war are applied in everyday situations among US civilian populations. The vision of militarized control of a city like Camden was facilitated through the surveillance networks that monitored the city and its residents in real time: these digital infrastructures were as central to the vision of a revived Camden as the police officers themselves.

The role of surveillance networks and automated, algorithmic authority is central to “smart” visions, “anchoring” the “spectrum of control” through interlinking, adaptable technologies that are constantly “tracking bodies as they move through space; surveilling the types of faces on the street; sending police to remove unwanted people; moving traffic along the roads; and more” (Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015: 9). Scholars have recognized how smart urbanization “introduce[s] specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ city” and in so doing “naturalize,” “justify,” and “normalize” a vision of acceptable social behavior in line with an entrepreneurial vision of a new, business-friendly city (Vanolo, 2014: 1–3). Theorizing this societal control through smart city’ systems focuses on the digitization of urban surveillance and policing as an apparatus of power (Foucault, 1980: 194), and more specifically of the role contemporary forms of surveillance play in controlling the population of the city (Deleuze, 1992).

In these data-driven situations, the flow of the “right” bodies, goods, and information is privileged and given priority: the city and its residents are managed like infrastructure in a “logistical enterprise” (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016: 15). Terming this condition a security apparatus, as “the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1980: 194) joins the infrastructures of surveillance and policing with the logic of safety and security that the city government and developers perpetuated. An apparatus is, in Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Foucault (1980), “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 2009: 14). Expanding the definition, Agamben writes that an apparatus is: “discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on” (2009: 2–3).

Conceptually, the usefulness of “apparatus” is to bring together the manifold elements involved in the re-aligning the governing of the city in anticipation of development, in particular thorough technologies that “introduce” the governing tactics into “everyday life” (Braun, 2014: 55). It is the shift from policing as disciplining a population through the presence (or absence) of police to the “embedding of computing into the fabric of cities” that “modulate affects and channel action across space” (Kitchin et al., 2017). This “management at a distance” through “automated” systems (Klauser et al., 2014: 1–2) intensifies the ability to control a city as “interconnected and continuous,” trackable spaces (Martinez, 2011: 201). Even without the immediate presence of a police officer to note a crime, the systems can record and document an incident for later analysis.

Theorizing Camden’s surveillance networks and policing tactics as an apparatus of security, this paper extends critiques of smart urbanization as a governmental, disciplinary tactic relying on law, digital infrastructure, and a particular vision of a city as a stage for orderly, planned development. Considering the digital infrastructure, community policing tactics, data analytics, police officers, and their more traditional policing devices such as patrol cars as a security apparatus are means of weaving together these linked systems, bodies, and devices as they prepared Camden for spatially-targeted urban transformation. The apparatus becomes inseparable from governance itself (Agamben, 2009: 23–24).

As a component of the larger restructuring of multinational, corporate reinvestment in Camden, this security apparatus was created and maintained through multiple layers of networked digital infrastructure, for instance, syncing cameras on utility poles to the urban control room, then sending an automated alert through a wireless cellular service to an officer on foot or in a patrol car. Rather than consider the infrastructure singly or in parts, grouping these devices and connective systems together with the law and policies underlying them, and the technicians operating and officers responding to the information, Camden’s terrain itself becomes folded into the apparatus of surveillance and control in order to create the conditions for reinvestment in the city.

From industrial collapse to a revitalized Camden

Camden’s decline mirrors that of many industrial-era cities in the United States, with anchor companies including RCA Victor and Campbell’s Soup abandoning the city as the national and global economy shifted to Post-Fordist manufacturing techniques in cheaper, nonunion regions (Cowie, 2001), disinvestment and white flight to the suburbs following riots in 1971, and the resulting elimination of the city’s tax base leading to significant cuts to civic services including education, infrastructure, and policing (Gilette, 2006). In reaction to the hollowing out of its tax base, resulting structural deficit, and the nationwide neoliberal governance climate over the same period (Hackworth, 2007), Camden’s city government was forced to operate under severe fiscal constraints enforced by state control of the budget beginning in the early 1980s (Gilette, 2006).

Camden’s spatially-bounded revitalization efforts shared similarities with the wider, established set of neoliberal, entrepreneurial urban governance (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 1989) strategies used to jumpstart post-industrial economic growth across Western Europe and North America. Typified in projects like Hudson Yards (Brash, 2011) or the Dublin Docklands (Byrne, 2016), to give two examples, the transformation of abandoned, often waterfront-industrial spaces through large-scale projects operated through top-down control. This control was delegated via public–private partnerships and utilized public funds for private gain, creating spatially-bounded transformation aimed at global enterprise (Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Camden’s political negotiations, private partnerships, and sectoral focus on innovation and knowledge enterprise mirrors the process discussed in the abovementioned literature (NJPP Deputy Director, 2016) and will be examined in a future paper. Figure 2 presents a map of Camden highlighting the three primary zones of revitalization.

Figure 2.

The three primary areas of economic development in Camden. Thick line designates city border. Map imagery source: Google 2016. Map by author.

The racialized poverty of Camden is most potently manifest in the divide between the city and its surrounding county, of which the city is part. As of the last US Census, Camden city, with 76,000 residents, was 48% African American and 17% white, with 8% holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, and with a median household income of $26,201 and 39% poverty rate (US Census, 2015a). Camden County, with 511,000 residents (including the city’s 76,000), was nearly 70% white and 21% African American, with 29% attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher, a median household income of $61,842—over twice that of Camden city—and a poverty rate of 13% (US Census, 2015b). These census facts briefly encapsulate the high degree of disparity in Camden today, a divide manifest in capital investment, or the failure of investment, leading to neighborhood decline citywide. This decline was extended by the shifting of state and local political power across southern New Jersey to suburban areas, including the rest of Camden County outside the city’s borders (Gilette, 2006; Smith et al., 2001).

Presentations of Camden’s decline in national media have persisted, reflecting and distorting (Gilette, 2013) the depths of poverty, crime, and despair present in the city. While Rolling Stone magazine (Tabbi, 2013) as well as Vice Magazine’s HBO show (Vice, 2015) sensationalized both the crime and the militaristic surveillance measures taken to combat crime, critics of this reportage do not deny the presence of longstanding problems, most notably “violent crime and [a] murder rate […] so high that on a per capita basis, it ‘put [Camden] somewhere between Honduras and Somalia,’” as the police chief told Rolling Stone’s reporter (Tabbi, 2013).

By 2015, targeted regeneration was aimed at attracting multinational firms but was also simply moving investment within the region, even from within Camden County, to take advantage of significant tax credits (Nurin, 2015; Saffron, 2015; Whiten, 2016). For instance, Subaru North America moved its headquarters five miles into Camden city in order to qualify for the tax breaks. Establishing new investment, bringing in innovation and information-focused enterprise, and ideally bringing jobs into the neighborhoods abandoned since the industrial economy left the city required both reducing crime and changing perceptions of Camden as an unsafe city that was unfit for new enterprise. While the political rhetoric behind revitalization focused on job creation (Coutinho et al., 2013), the ultimate utility of the revitalized zones was realized through increased profit via tax breaks, a common strategy of zone-based economic development worldwide (Easterling, 2014).

Camden’s tax abatement-fueled regeneration was facilitated by the Grow NJ Program (Coutinho et al., 2013) that awarded tax breaks to entice businesses to locate in impoverished areas; the whole of Camden city was designated one such area. While the tax holiday program was intended to bring jobs to marginalized neighborhoods in New Jersey’s cities, to a large extent, they facilitated major corporations from the region relocating to cities including Camden and bringing their existing workers with them. This will be the case with the anchor tenants in the waterfront as well as the majority of projects in other areas of the city (NJPP Deputy Director, 2016; Whiten, 2016). All these investments, facilitated by New Jersey policymaking and local governance decisions, transformed these areas of Camden into zones of and for multinational enterprise, operating through logics of free trade, tax holidays, and fast transportation connectivity between other zones in the region.

By 2017, New Jersey approved over $1.1 billion in tax breaks to 17 companies promising to stay or relocate to Camden (this is included in the nearly $2 billion of investment mentioned earlier). New Jersey Policy Perspectives, a liberal policy watchdog in the state, estimates that “The companies [in Camden] are required to maintain just 3,897 jobs in Camden as part of the deal. As a result, New Jersey taxpayers are paying an average of $293,000 per job” (Whiten, 2016). The size of the tax breaks to facilitate spatially-bounded redevelopment in a mid-sized, legacy city like Camden is new and, while beyond the scope of this essay, is important for critical urban scholars to investigate as an emerging economic development strategy in legacy cities.

Six largest tax breaks for companies moving to Camden (Source: Nurin, 2015)	Location	Amount of tax break	Number of jobs
Holtec advanced manufacturing facility	South Waterfront	$260 million	235 new, 160 relocated
EMIR Eastern metal recycling headquarters and scrapyard	South Waterfront	$253 million	285 new, 160 relocated
American Water Works private water provider headquarters	Central Waterfront	$164 million	100 new, 600 relocated
Subaru of America’s North American headquarters	Gateway District	$117 million	100 new, 500 relocated
Lockheed Martin defense contractor manufacturing facility	Gateway District	$107 million	250 relocated
Philadelphia 76ers basketball team practice facility and operations headquarters	Central Waterfront	$82 million	250 relocated

The enormous cost of subsidizing each job and the relative lack of local employment the companies are creating—only Holtec’s advanced manufacturing facility and EMIR’s scrap yard had the potential to hire Camden residents in a significant number (Nurin, 2015)—speaks to the dissonance between visions of revitalization in spatially-demarcated zones versus the perception of safety fostered by data-driven policing across the entirety of Camden. As will be detailed below, this perception did not meet the reality of crime reduction in the city.

The evolution of policing practices in Camden

The transformation of policing in Camden began with the dissolution of their longstanding city police force and the installation of a county police force in May 2013 (Zernike, 2014) but was only the latest stage in the city’s inability to fund and manage its police force, which was first an issue in 1986 (Rogovin, 2006: 7). As the New York Times reported,

Camden’s budget was $167 million [in 2011] 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. (Zernike, 2012)

In installing a county-controlled police force, Camden reduced costs by laying off unionized police officers and eliminating a variety of pay bonuses associated with patrolling in the city. The impetus to revamp the police force was longstanding. As laid out in a 2006 report by the state’s Attorney General’s office, “the absence of community-engagement [was seen] as central to the failings of the police to provide adequate services to the city’s residents” (Rogovin, 2006: 7–8). The need to reform a police force largely operating outside of the city’s control was highlighted by a 2004 designation that Camden was the most unsafe city in the United States (Rogovin, 2006: 1).

A full discussion of the politics of county control is beyond the scope of this essay, but it should be noted that largely suburban Camden County has had a contentious relationship with the politically more liberal and minority–majority population city of Camden (Gilette, 2006: 191–243). Shifting management of the police force allowed the county and its “wealthier and whiter” residents to dictate how the city was policed (Tabbi, 2013). In relinquishing control of its police force, Camden County took over fiscal management of policing. While the county police force could be organized to patrol any and all cities in the county if a city agreed to dissolve their locally-controlled force, Camden city was the only one to sign up for the new police force (Zernike, 2012).

With the transition to a county force, policing in Camden took two parallel tracks: integrating digital surveillance technologies into policing efforts and implementing a community policing strategy by placing more officers more of the time on the streets and on foot in an effort to regain the trust of Camden’s residents. Because community policing is the public and visible face of the new force, it will be discussed first, before shifting to discuss the underlying monitoring systems that form the digital backend to Camden’s security apparatus.

The initial turn to community policing and the militarization of police forces in the US began in response to the civil rights protests of the 1960s (Williams, 2011). While community policing has been purposely defined vaguely in order to be inclusive of nearly any policing strategy, in general, it has succeeded in improving a city’s opinion of its police force but has not definitively contributed to the general decline in crime over the same period. Scholars recognize that it is difficult to effectively evaluate community policing because what community policing actually entails is ambiguous, and, nationwide, its implementation has been concurrent with other major changes to policing strategies such as the implementation of new technologies (Gordner, 2014: 149–153, 164–165).

Critiquing community policing, Steve Herbert (2014) raises the issue that in disenfranchised cities like Camden, the expectation that community policing would involve a community is flawed due to the lack of existing communitarian social relations that the police and residents could draw on: there has to be a functioning, neighborhood-based sense of community for this style of policing to work, something Camden largely lacked (Wheeler, 2016). Nonetheless, the expectation that technology-driven community policing—as well as the application of militarized language—can transform the city was central to comments then-President Obama made:

[Camden] is using community policing and data to drive down crime. They’ve got a war room with cameras trained on hot spots around the city. And they’ve got software that lets community residents direct those cameras on where drug dealers or gang are congregating. And that way local residents feel that they are not just being spied on, they are partners with the police. (Obama, 2015)

This quote displayed the hope and expectations placed both on the surveillance technologies and the residents themselves to affect positive change in the city.

Recommendations for implementing a community policing strategy in Camden were laid out in the abovementioned New Jersey Attorney General Office’s report, specifying, in addition to internal organizational changes, training officers in problem-solving techniques, ensuring district commanders have completed sensitivity and cultural training, and holding officers accountable to their city (Rogovin, 2006: 11–12). Community policing, as its name suggests, necessitates knowing the neighborhoods and their residents; this is one area where, in recent history, the strategy has achieved success (Gordner, 2014). The Camden County force implemented community policing strategies as a means of moving “from reactive to pro-active policing” (CCPD, 2011: 1), notably installing a “Neighborhood Resources Officer” in each district to “work on addressing long term, systemic problems” and organizing “collaborative efforts between community members and the police” (CCPD, 2011: 7). Camden’s community policing strategy quickly realized significant crime reduction, and positive local and national media attention as a result. In a 2014 follow-up article to their article quoted at the start of this section, the New York Times published a relatively positive tribute to the city, acknowledging that in the two years since the county police took over, homicides were down significantly, shootings were down 43%, and violent crime down 22%. Average response time was down to under 5 min from over 60 min previously. The police also held “meet-the-officer events at parks and churches” and sent a soft-serve ice cream truck into the neighborhoods to give free ice cream to children (Zernike, 2014). While dishing out ice cream or interacting with the city and its residents, the officers on the street are in constant contact with the operations center and its networked systems monitoring action throughout the city (Ercolani, 2014).

Securing the city through digitized surveillance

The militarized, digital surveillance network and the attendant makeover of Camden’s police force were seen as necessary factors to both lower crime in the city and to challenge widespread and longstanding perceptions that Camden’s residents and economy were beyond investment (Danley, 2017; Gilette, 2006; Tabbi, 2013; Vice, 2015). In Camden, creating the conditions for successful revitalization necessitated both the tax breaks to attract enterprise but, more importantly, that the city be perceived safe. Facilitating these changed perceptions involved both the community policing script put forward by the Camden County Police force discussed above, as well as the multi-faceted, digitized security apparatus operating both horizontally and vertically, through cameras mounted above the streets, within police vehicles, and fixed on the bodies of officers.

Driving or walking through Camden, the surveillance network was unobtrusive but could be found without difficulty (Figure 3). Cameras are the most visible element, mounted on utility poles, light posts, and stoplights, often at busy intersections. As is typical of digital infrastructure, the presence of these networked devices does not change the material fabric of the city so much as actively transform the experience of the place through the potential-and-very-likely monitoring from above (Graham, 2016). The elements of the surveillance network are discussed below.

Figure 3.

An Eye in the Sky camera mounted on a utility pole near the northern border of Camden. May 2016. Photo by author.

The technological heart of the effort is the Camden County-operated urban control room, utilizing “Cutting Edge Crime Fighting Technology” (State of New Jersey, 2014). This “Real-Time Tactical Operations and Information Center” located in the central police station in downtown Camden opened in 2011 at a cost of $4.5 million (Tabbi, 2013). When the county police force took over in 2013, it employed 120 civilian operators (Zernike, 2014), 28 working at any one time (Bereznak, 2015) working in the space, and as the county policing plan states, “maintain[ing] a real-time awareness of conditions with the operating environment […] and monitor[ing] the tactical deployment of all assets in the field” (CCPD, 2011: 5). The control room has adopted an aesthetic of control rooms elsewhere (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016), with a wall of large computer monitors above the analysts’ desks. The control room used algorithms for automatic processing of big data from the citywide monitoring systems. Police cruisers were tracked by global positioning system (GPS) in order to alert officers to nearby issues identified through the camera network (Laday, 2013; Tabbi, 2013; Zernike, 2014). 911 emergency services and police dispatch also are managed through the control room, as was a Strategic Analysis Unit that evaluated crime data and policing data and conducted predictive planning for crime fighting efforts (CCPD, 2011: 5).

As part of a nationwide effort to produce “21st century policing” such as practiced in Camden, the Police Data Initiative was launched by President Obama in the city in May 2015. Noting Camden’s early success harnessing surveillance technology and data analytics to lower crime, the initiative’s goal was to use open data to foster “increased transparency” and trust-building between city residents and their police. Fifty-three policing jurisdictions covering 40 million people joined the initiative in its first year (Wardell and Ross, 2016), but many of those jurisdictions did not release their data, including Camden (Police Foundation, 2015). As is often the case with smart city initiatives, the potential of the project often overshadows the successful, long-term achievement of the stated goals of the project (Shelton et al., 2015).

The Eye in the Sky camera network went online alongside the urban control room in 2011 with 131 cameras at a cost of $1.8 million (Associated Press, 2011). In 2015, the network expanded to 221 cameras citywide, with an additional cost of $2.3 million (City of Camden, 2015b). The camera network “gives the ability to ‘virtually patrol the community’” according to Camden’s mayor (Fiedler, 2011), to augment the eyes of police in the neighborhoods and to record what could become visual evidence of crimes committed. These cameras provide the core of Camden’s “smart” policing abilities both through catching criminal events in the moment but also through the ability to recall events after the fact, for instance, tracking a car through the city both before and after its passengers committed a crime.

In tandem with the camera network, Camden installed the privately-owned ShotSpotter system, with 35 microphones placed in areas known for crime, microphones that triangulate the location of gunshots down to a few feet (State of New Jersey, 2014). These microphones could also automatically direct nearby Eye in the Sky cameras to train their lenses toward a location of a gunshot (Bereznak, 2015). Between the first and second year of use, total shootings within Shotspotter’s covered range fell from 704 in 2013 to 366 in 2014 (CCPD, 2015a). The apparent success in lowering gunshots in the city led Camden to invest further in the system to cover more of the city (Bereznak, 2015). In a notable aside, in 2015 Shotspotter’s parent company signed an agreement with General Electric’s smart city division to install Shotspotter microphones in General Electric’s new, “smart” streetlights, indicating that early adopter, high-crime cities like Camden are prototyping surveillance technologies that will likely see widespread dispersal in coming years (Brandom, 2015; General Electric, 2015).

The Interactive Community Alert Network (abbreviated iCan) is a social media-styled, anonymous, online neighborhood crime watch where vetted city residents can, after passing a background check, view live Eye in the Sky video feeds from near to their home and/or work, and directly report activity deemed suspicious back to the urban control room downtown, where a technician can send a police officer out to the area (Tsiaras, 2015). The system was justified by its private developer because of its ability for residents to interact with police without having to be seen on the street doing so, which can be an issue in cities like Camden, with long histories of mistrust of the police. As the developer writes in promotional materials, “iCan adds an important element that helps transform the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign into ‘If You See Something, Show Us … Instantly’” (CCPD, 2015a; Packet Talk, 2011). Since its launch in 2014, the network has had over 70 residents or community groups sign up (Tsiaras, 2015).

With automated license plate readers, the ability to track people who live in, work in, or just pass through the city was significant and not without concern due to the privacy implications (Farivar, 2015). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued, at issue was that, with the long-term storage of vehicle data, personal information about city residents was acquired and a data breach could reveal significant, otherwise private information (Maass and Quintin, 2015). Regardless of the ability to monitor cars driving into Camden to, for instance, purchase drugs, or to track stolen vehicles in the city, the system was also inherently tracking all residents as they make their daily journeys.

Every patrol car has the automated license plate readers installed and constantly running, logging the license plate numbers of passing vehicles, comparing the plate to a record of earlier crimes, and using GPS to mark where the vehicle was at that time. Maintaining this database allows the police to follow past journeys long after they occurred (Bereznak, 2015). Camden’s data are officially kept for five years (Camden Police Department, 2011: 9).

Camden piloted a body-worn camera program for officers in early 2016, purchasing 325 cameras at a cost of $800 each (Bereznak, 2015; CCPD, 2016). The installation of these cameras was touted as a means of offering accountability to the community, that the use of body-worn cameras would

hold civilians and officers accountable to act responsibly and lawfully, increase officer and civilian safety, foster a sense of trust and transparency between citizens and the CCPD, reduce the number of false allegations of police assaults, and encourage prompt resolution of citizen complaints and internal investigations. (CCPD, 2016: 3)

In bringing the security apparatus onto the bodies of officers, the body-worn cameras finalize in a sense the process of adding a layer of digital mediation to community policing in Camden. Even the face-to-face interaction of officers and residents relied on the digital, networked back-end of real-time, automated information gathering and algorithmic analysis facilitated through the surveillance network and the control room staff.

Surveilling the city to guarantee investment in the zone

[S]urveillance by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the city into the interior of an immense prison. (Agamben, 2009: 23)

Automating the surveilling and policing of undesirable activity was a foundational step in prototyping Camden’s near-future revival. How Camden policed the city beyond the three zones of redevelopment became crucial for signaling that Camden had crime under control, even as crime rates were not actually declining, as will be discussed below. The security apparatus had to be in place before businesses would come: urban regeneration was predicated on the installation of militarized, citywide surveillance.

The planning of the Camden Waterfront redevelopment reflected this process. When Liberty Property Trust, the Philadelphia-based real estate developer of the waterfront project, presented their plan at a community meeting in Camden, the company’s representatives spoke repeatedly of ensuring the safety of a 26-year-old white female commuter as the mark of the project’s success (Christiansen, 2016). This is a demographic representative perhaps of Liberty Property Trust’s desired future residents but not of Camden’s current racial makeup, and this framing of development was not a holistic approach to building the waterfront into a safe and inclusive neighborhood for both new and existing residents. Exclusionary outcomes that shift the demographic from existing communities of color to whiter new residents was a not-uncommon component of large-scale urban economic development in Camden’s surrounding region, having happened just downstream on the Delaware River in Chester, Pennsylvania (Mele, 2013).

The Camden Waterfront and the two other zones may represent a globally-oriented, revitalized era for the city’s economy. However, the potential for these zones to reproduce existing and endemic inequalities latent in the city was strong. In applying this uneven, zone-based approach to urban revitalization, Camden’s efforts marked an extension of military urbanism with the underlying “colonial tropes” (Graham, 2010: xix) of benefit for groups from outside the place itself, but with added twist of treating the entire city as a surveilled, securitized space in order to facilitate investment in specific areas. As Graham writes, “Rather than address the causes of poverty or insecurity, however, political responses now invariably ‘focus on shoring up a diminished sense of safety, carefully nurtured by a renewed faith in all things military’” (Graham, 2010: 74, citing Giroux, 2006: 186). The political response to crime and poverty in Camden, across federal, state, and county-levels, was to invest in innovative policing strategies with the hope that doing so would then bolster resources for education and job creation (Director of Communications, 2016), but unfortunately the first does not automatically lead to the latter two.

Early on, the security apparatus appeared to have succeeded at its purpose. Crime was down 42% between 2013 to 2014, with homicides dropping 42% and violent crime down 21% (CCPD, 2015b). Camden used these statistics to highlight their success in creating a safer city in promotional materials that touted improvements in safety, measured through reductions in violent and nonviolent crime and extolled as a marker of “unprecedented progress” (City of Camden: 2015c: 4–7). As the mayor put it, “Our improved policing model and increased public safety has an impact that can be seen in the neighborhoods, where children play on the streets, in the civic sphere, and in changed perceptions of Camden” (Cooper’s Ferry Partnership, 2015: 2). The city and its residents were themselves a backdrop to the narrative of transformative change.

While the American Civil Liberties Union-New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) praised the drastic 93% reduction in police response times in Camden, they also raise attention to the vast increase in summonses for a variety of minor nuisance matters, such as riding a bicycle without a bell, driving with tinted windows, and inadequate lights on an automobile (ACLU-NJ, 2015). A part of the expanded policing that went unmentioned in the promotional materials discussed above was an escalation in arrests and citations for trivial matters. The ACLU-NJ raised issue with this, writing that:

The reality is that more people are being arrested for petty offenses, which is overwhelming the courts and has the potential to create a climate of fear, rather than respect, in the community. […] Focusing police resources on criminalizing minor misbehavior can lead to greater mistrust and a feeling of harassment by the police. Arrests and summonses for low-level offenses can have a spiraling effect that could lead to people losing their jobs, public benefits or immigration status. These sanctions can also result in hundreds of dollars in fines and a criminal record that makes it harder to get a job in the future. (ACLU-NJ, 2015)

The apparatus formatted the city into a “smart” place (Bratton, 2016: 164) through its “spectrum of control” (Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015) and nourished a narrative of change, but the narrative did not align with events on the streets. After two years of declining crime, 2016 brought a 150% uptick in murders. Forty-seven murders were committed in 2016, compared to 32 in 2015 (Walsh, 2017). High-technology efforts at community policing still require trained, skilled police officers, and Camden’s force has had both high attrition rates and was not been able to reach its full staffing level of 400 officers until the end of 2016 (Walsh, 2017; Zalot, 2016). The increase in violence in 2016 led the president-elect of Camden County’s NAACP to question whether the surveillance network and the focus on community policing had achieved substantive change, or if the city had descended into the same public safety crisis that precipitated transforming the police force beginning in 2011 (Adomaitis, 2016a).

It should be noted as well that, as Monahan (2007) argues, a notable feature of control rooms and these citywide digital monitoring systems more generally is their ability to, through upgrading to new technologies or algorithmic analytic strategies, extend their fields of surveillance, with the subsequent ability to monitor or control the city in unforeseen ways. As the security apparatus did not live up to initial promises, the police force could potentially invest in new iterations or software upgrades of the digital surveillance infrastructure. Furthermore, data-driven policing and cameras in crime-plagued neighborhoods were not the same as safe neighborhoods, and while the murder rate may (and hopefully will) drop again, this uptick signaled that the security apparatus, despite significant investment in it, did not inherently achieve its goal of creating a safe Camden.

Conclusion

This Camden study contributes to critical scholarship on the smart city, miliary urbanism, and surveillance studies through its examination of police surveillance as a mechanism of social control in order to advance urban redevelopment agendas. While the revitalization applied a common spatial strategy seen across many cities, the installation of a citywide surveillance network in order to facilitate this development was exceptional. Camden’s prototyping of automated surveillance for urban revitalization has implications in cities worldwide. Here, we see the splintering urbanism thesis (Graham and Marvin, 2001) extended, where the enclaves of global capitalism throughout, in this case, the Philadelphia region retain high connectivity to each other, across a continuiously fractured landscape. Investment in high-technology systems of control is perceived necessary and inevitable for economic growth, even if that growth is concentrated in zones that do not facilitate more widespread transformation. As Camden had been recognized as the outlier, the most dangerous city in North America (Tabbi, 2013), will its next role be to highlight the implemetation of new forms of smart city-military urbanisation for economic development? As deindustrialized cities like Camden face reinvestment and integration into the new economy, they prod scholars to examine the factors and forces of social control within and beyond the zones of redevelopment.

No simple fix will emerge for Camden, especially not one that relies so heavily on investment in “smart city” technologies that are solely used for surveillance. The security apparatus in Camden did not reduce crime rates. It did however succeed in signaling the potential and willingness for change and investment on the part of the city and county governments, but on its own, the apparatus could not achieve widespread, generative change across the entire city, which would necessitate investment in more than digital surveillance infrastructure and a revamped police force. Additionally, the widespread revitalization of the city will require investment in Camden’s residential neighborhoods, not just in zones targeted for investment through massive tax breaks, a point made by the head of a Camden-based community development organization (LAEDA, 2016). Achieving a safe city takes more than a surveillance-based technological fix.

In pushing back on Rolling Stone magazine’s generalized and even sensationalist portrayal of policing in Camden as a “dark, nihilistic comedy: a perpetual self-occupation” (Tabbi, 2013), Rutgers University–Camden’s Emeritus Professor of History Howard Gilette argued against the “lack of adequate contextualization of [Camden’s] situation” (2013). Camden’s city and county government has been forced to operate within the market-driven rationality of neoliberalism, even when there was no “market” nor tax base to speak of after industry fled (Gilette, 2006). This is not to argue that inequalities have not been perpetuated in this majority–minority city. As in much of the US, the majority-white county has received more attention and funding than the city. Camden has been a “dark, nihilistic comedy” for decades, and the “normal” that Rolling Stone’s Matt Tabbi argues was what Camden’s Police Chief was “optimistically” working toward with the city’s new policing strategies never existed, certainly not in the lifetimes of the majority of Camden’s residents (LAEDA, 2016; Tabbi, 2013). Gilette goes further, writing that “Camden police chief Scott Thompson calls the new devices the key to doing more with less, and arguably such devices, as they have been employed in other cities, have been actively sought by residents” (2013). The ACLU New Jersey’s report (2015) echoes this sentiment: no one in the city is arguing to return to the previous era of policing, and the dramatically faster police response times have improved community relations. Points of contention between the police and city residents remain, specifically regarding confrontational race relations stemming from the majority of the police force coming from outside the city, which has been reinforced through high turnover among the police force itself (Danley, 2017). These issues were beginning to be addressed, if slowly, through community meetings and the continued community-focused policing efforts to bridge longstanding divides (Adomaitis, 2016b).

The primary impact of the security apparatus was to advance economic ambitions in zones like the Camden Waterfront project. Massive tax breaks may provide the incentive for corporations to locate in the city, but presence of the security apparatus and its properties of social control justifies and secures the investment. It remains to be seen if and how and at what cost to the city’s residents the apparatus can affect a long-term reduction in crime in the city; it remains to be seen if and how the economic transformation spreads citywide, if and how the zones actively bring investment and jobs into the rest of the city.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jonathan Silver, Daniel Silver, and Renee Tapp for support with fieldwork. Thanks to Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston’s Junior Faculty Research Seminar, in particular Joseph Brown for their feedback on early drafts. This paper emerged out of ones presented at the Creating Smart Cities workshop at the Programmable City, National University of Ireland, Maynooth as well as the 2016 Regional Studies Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author(s) gratefully acknowledges the financial support from University of Massachusetts, Boston’s Joseph P. Healey Research Grant in supporting the research for this paper.

Alan Wiig is an assistant professor of Urban Planning and Community Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research focuses on infrastructure as a medium and metaphor of change across the economic, political, and social dimensions of cities today.

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