Camden Crime Largely Drug Related November 29, 2005
News Summary
Camden, N.J., has the nation's worst crime problem. Most of Camden's crime is drug-related. And most of the customers of the city's drug dealers come from outside the city, the Gloucester County Times reported Nov. 28.Bill Shralow, a spokesperson for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, said that up to 70 percent of people arrested in Camden for trying to buy drugs are nonresidents, many of them from Gloucester County and the city's other suburbs. "People in this area know that Camden has somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 open-air drug sets," Shralow said. "The narcotics trafficking wouldn't exist -- at least not to the extent that it does -- without demand from places like Gloucester County."
Suburban police worry about drug crime from Camden spilling out into their communities. "We're especially interested in transient areas such as apartment complexes where individuals may try to set up a drug trade," said Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton. Meanwhile, Camden's poor reputation on crime has hurt institutions like Rutgers University, which last year had 100 fewer students choose to attend classes at the school's downtown campus, despite a location adjacent to Camden's waterfront redevelopment district.
"We have to show people that our campus and our neighborhood is much more than the sum of the headlines," said Rutgers spokesperson Mike Sepanic.
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