Jae C. Hong / AP file

School police Sgt. Kevin Philips checks out a rifle from the police armory in Santa Ana, Calif., on Jan. 24. Officials in this Los Angeles-area city say the high-powered weapons now in the hands of school police could prevent a massacre.

In post-Newtown America, those with power say they must act to prevent another massacre of innocents.

The Obama administration wants stiffer gun control, and $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 more on-campus police or counselors, or purchase security technology. State legislators are considering shifting millions of dollars around to help schools hire more police. Some locals aren’t waiting: The 5,500-resident town of Jordan, Minn., has moved its entire eight-officer police force into schools.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said after a young man shot his way into his former grammar school on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 first-graders and six educators.

With the new year, the NRA has been flexing its political muscle, lobbying states not just to hire more school police — under the group’s National School Shield project — but also to pass laws allowing teachers or other staff to bring licensed guns to school to defend their students and themselves. 

After Newtown, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, was an early supporter of federal aid to hire more school police.“If a school district wants to have a community policing presence, I think it’s very important they have it,” Boxer told the Washington Post.

Beyond the headlines, though, the push for more cops or other armed security personnel in schools is running headlong into another movement that’s been quietly growing in states as diverse as Mississippi, New York, Utah, Texas and California.

It’s a push to get police out of schools, or at least to end their involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers. 

Civil-rights groups and juvenile court judges — and even some officials within the Obama administration — argue that because the ranks of police began growing in schools in the late 1990s, the criminal justice system’s  involvement in student discipline has gotten entirely out of hand in some communities. That has put students, especially ethnic minorities, on a path to failure, they say — the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. 

In Los Angeles, for example, scores of students, most Latino or black and many just 11 or 12 years old, have been ticketed by school officers for minor infractions often categorized as disturbing the peace. In Austin, Texas, a 12-year-old was forced to court for spraying on perfume in class. In DeSoto County, Miss. officers and a school district were sued after a bus surveillance video — seen in part by a reporter — revealed officers unjustifiably arresting black students, the suit alleged, and threatening others with a “a bullet between the eyes.”

Optimists — Education Secretary Arne Duncan among them — say cops in schools are not an either/or proposition: Careful training, they say, will ensure that school police deployed in the wake of Newtown protect, rather than intimidate, students. 

But many civil-rights advocates are worried. They say plenty of cities and states are only beginning to come to grips with allegations that schools, and school-based police, have unjustifiably sent students into the criminal-justice system.

A push for security
Police presence in schools has been growing for years. The number of full-time city police officers assigned to schools increased nearly 40 percent from 1997 to 2007, according to the U.S. Justice Department. One infamous incident fueling that rise was the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher by two students at Columbine High School in suburban Denver.  

After Newtown, though, an intense new round of calls for more cops in schools has echoed through small towns and big cities nationwide.

The state legislative delegation of Broward County, Fla., for example, quickly approved a proposal in January — it must now be approved by state legislators — that could allow increases in property taxes in Broward to pay for more school police, at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group, told the Center for Public Integrity that in February it began tracking a flurry of school-security legislation in more than 20 states.

Since January, two school-security bills in Mississippi, publicly backed by NRA representatives, have been moving fast through the Statehouse.

One bill would set up a $7.5 million school-security fund to offer Mississippi schools $10,000 matching grants to hire police. The other bill, which Mississippi’s House of Representatives approved  Feb. 13, would allow districts to designate teachers or other school staff to act as a secret defense force in the event of an attack. Volunteers would take their own licensed, concealed weapons to school. The House rejected a proposal to require psychological evaluations of those designated by districts.

Alabama legislators are considering creating a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school. Indiana lawmakers are weighing a proposal to set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools. States where legislators have introduced proposals to allow designated teachers or other school staff to be armed include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Texas and Utah already allow licensed gun owners to take weapons onto campuses under certain circumstances. Legislators in those states are discussing ideas for supporting school staff who want to have weapons at school for defense.

The NRA isn’t alone in trying to influence the debate. The Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, or NASRO, is pushing for more law enforcement in schools. NASRO opposes arming teachers. 

Stung by criticism of resource officers, the nonprofit NASRO vigorously disputes the idea that a school-to-prison pipeline is pervasive. In “To Protect and Educate,” a report issued last October, NASRO said: “Attacks against the school resource officer are superficial and polemical.”

On a Facebook page, NASRO has posted multiple news reports about school resource officers foiling violent acts by students.

Kevin Quinn, president of NASRO, said in an interview that NASRO regards cases of abuses by school police to be isolated. “The No. 1 way to combat that is training,” said Quinn, a school resource officer in the Phoenix area.

Quinn agreed with civil rights advocates that some school districts have become too reliant on police to enforce discipline. Over the last decade, more schools have adopted “zero tolerance” polices, not just for guns or other weapons or drugs, but for behavior that’s seen as disorderly or defiant.

“The problem,” Quinn said, “is the school at times says, ‘Oh, we’ve got a cop. Let him take care of things.’”

Out of hand?
Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske, of Clayton County, Ga., is not against police in schools, but firmly believes that a school-to-prison pipeline exists.

When Teske took the bench in 1999 in his Atlanta suburb, which is 66 percent black, one-third of the cases in his court were kids referred from schools. By 2004, he said, 92 percent of the 1,400 cases in his court came from schools, mostly for alleged disruption and disorderly conduct.

Lt. Francisco Romero, Clayton’s school resource officer at the time, told the Center for Public Integrity that he was disturbed to discover that one year he arrested more people — students — than any other officer in Clayton.

Fed up, Teske called together school and police leaders and hammered out a protocol requiring counseling and clear warnings before students were sent to court. Teske credits the protocol with improving relationships between students and police, and driving down juvenile felonies by 51 percent and increasing graduation rates by 24 percent.

“If police are placed on campus without written protocols defining their role, the results will be disastrous — just as removing existing police from campus can have unintended consequences,” Teske wrote in the publication Youth Today after the Newtown killings.

Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a national civil-rights group urging discipline reforms, said that after the 1999 Columbine shootings, police citations of students in the city of Denver skyrocketed. Student referrals to police increased by 71 percent between 2000 and 2004. Only 7 percent of referrals to law enforcement from Denver’s schools, whose students are mostly nonwhite, were for serious offenses such as carrying a weapon.

In February, Denver school and police officials signed an agreement that obliges school police to “de-escalate” conflicts, attend training sessions on child psychology and embrace “restorative justice,” which requires students to sit down and resolve problems outside the criminal court system.

Dianis, whose group collaborated on the Denver agreement, hopes Denver’s decision influences other jurisdictions as they weigh putting more police in schools.

In Los Angeles — home to the country’s largest school police force — school leaders, judges, police and civil-rights activists have been holding a series of meetings to work toward a protocol for student citations and arrests.

The Center for Public Integrity analyzed Los Angeles Unified School District Police records and found that from 2009 through 2011, officers issued about 10,000 tickets a year to students, mostly in low-income neighborhoods.

More than 40 percent of citations, the Center also found, went to students 14 or younger in schools that parents said were more heavily policed. Juvenile court judges complained about a parade of children in court for infractions better dealt with at school.

Reconciling such findings with current security concerns is difficult, concedes Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program. Parker said it sounds “callous” to protest placing more police in schools after Newtown, a town that immediately after the December massacre assigned officers to guard schools.

But one of the ACLU’s high-profile lawsuits involving schools right now accuses New York City police — whose ranks have grown in schools by 73 percent since 1998 — of violating students’ rights by using excessive force, handcuffing and arrests in response to infractions such as drawing on a desk.

“It’s very likely that officers dealing with children in Newtown will deal with them differently than children in Harlem,” Parker said. “It is likely to be more of an ‘Officer Joe, your friend,’ who is there than someone who tells you to stand up against a wall and spread your legs.”

New York City police administrators insist that officers have lowered crime in schools and say that the ACLU “talks about arrests in schools but, conveniently, not crimes.” 

On Dec. 13, the day before the Newtown killings, Parker’s Racial Justice Program filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of ethnic-minority students allegedly rounded up by police in December 2010 at West High School in Salt Lake City.

The school district and the Salt Lake City police said they could not comment, because of a policy not to discuss pending litigation. 

The ACLU suit alleges that plaintiff Kevin Winston’s son, Kaleb, was 14 when two plainclothes officers ushered the student, who is half-black, into a room and falsely accused him of gang membership and graffiti, or “tagging.”

An officer allegedly grabbed Kaleb’s arm, told him, “Quit acting tough,” and searched his backpack. The suit claims that officers forced Kaleb, who has no juvenile record, to pose for a photo — to put in a gang database — holding a sign with his name and the word “tagger” on it.

After he was released, the lawsuit alleges, Kaleb was shaken, called his parents and asked to go home. The suit alleges that when Lisa Winston, his mother, protested what had happened officers told her the sweep was done because of “a problem with the Mexicans.”

On March 1, the Salt Lake defendants filed a court document admitting that police had entered the school and questioned students. But in the documents, they denied the officers "acted unconstitutionally" or were targeting “Mexicans.”

In February, a similar suit filed by the ACLU of Southern California in 2011 was partially settled on behalf of 56 students at Hoover High School in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. The agreement does not contain an admission of wrongdoing, the Associated Press reported. 

The suit said that school administrators and Glendale police interrogated Latino and other minority students, and made them pose for mock mug shots.

Glendale police Sgt. Thomas Lorenz told the AP that the actions were an attempt to educate students on the peril of gangs. He denied that officers’ methods amounted to racial profiling.

“I’ve never been in trouble, and it was confusing, terrifying and humiliating,” Ashley Flores, who was 16 when the incident happened.

The settlement requires Glendale police and school officials to notify parents if students are to be questioned on campus. To ensure that officers uphold students’ rights, they will be trained to avoid racial profiling.

Walking the line
Michael Nash, presiding juvenile court judge in Los Angeles County, said in an interview that it’s hard to argue against placing police in schools — if they stay out of discipline matters.

As president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Nash sent a strongly worded letter to the Obama administration on Jan. 15, responding to the administration’s call for ideas on school safety.

“Research shows that aggressive security measures produce alienation and mistrust among students, which, in turn, can disrupt the learning environment,” the letter said. “Such restrictive environments may actually lead to violence, thus jeopardizing, instead of promoting, school safety.”

A student’s odds of dropping out of high school quadruple with a first-time court appearance, Nash wrote. Last summer, the judges’ council began a national campaign “to support school engagement and reduce school expulsion.” Putting more armed personnel into schools, Nash said, could prove “counterproductive” to this effort. 

On Jan. 16, the White House announced it would seek congressional authorization for a $385 million school violence prevention package for fiscal year 2014.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the president’s proposals would go to appropriate committees. A Washington Post poll in January suggested that the recommendation for hiring more school police would face little opposition. The poll found that 55 percent of the public would even support a law to put an armed guard in every school.

A centerpiece of the White House proposal is the request for $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 new police. But in nod to concerns like Nash’s, schools could also use grants to hire counselors and school psychologists.

The administration also proposes $50 million to help 8,000 schools create safer and more “nurturing” atmospheres at schools. Another $25 million would be used to help schools struggling with “pervasive violence,” and $30 million would be for one-time grants for states to help schools develop emergency plans.

A total of $130 million would be for helping schools adopt conflict-resolution programs and improving early detection of student mental health problems.

In a January media call, Education secretary Duncan was asked to respond to concerns that more police would lead to misguided crackdowns on students.

“There’s no reason why additional school resources have to drive up the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline,” Duncan said. “Execution is really important — taking time train people in a really thoughtful way.” The Department of Justice, he said, will be in on that training.

Duncan is no stranger to controversy over school discipline.

Between 2009 and 2012, the Department of Education launched more than 20 investigations into allegations in school districts that minority students were punished more harshly than white pupils for the same violations of school rules. Duncan’s department aims to amicably reach agreements with districts to change discipline practices. Last year, the department also released an unprecedented analysis of national school data showing that black students, 18 percent of the sample, represented 42 percent of students referred to law enforcement.

These issues have been aired in two Congressional hearings since December.  

In a February appearance before the House Education and the Workforce Committee, NASRO’s executive director, Mo Canady said the role of school resource officers is as “a trusted adult that a student can come to for information, for guidance.” He also said officers should leave “formal discipline” to educators.

Searching for balance
In Texas, police involvement in routine school discipline is a hot topic.

On Feb. 20, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Youth Law Center filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The complaint is based on citation records showing that black students in the Bryan Independent School District, 100 miles north of Houston, are given municipal court summonses in numbers far greater than the proportion of school enrollment they represent. 

Black students represent almost 22 percent of the 15,500-pupil Bryan district but were given more than half of all Class C misdemeanor tickets issued to students for “disruption of class” and “disorderly conduct,” according to the complaint. The complaint also says that staff of Texas Appleseed, a public-interest law group, observed Bryan students in court, including a 13-year-old whose teacher overheard him use profanity before class started and sent him to the principal, who, in turn, asked an officer to issue a ticket.

In a statement, the Bryan district said it would welcome “a dialogue” with federal education investigators. The citation numbers alleged in the complaint “were certainly no surprise to us, and we have been proactive in taking measures to address the issue,” the district said. “We hope the measures we are taking to support our minority students will result in a more positive outcome.”

Texas state Democratic Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, says it’s time to stop these tickets, which can cost families hundreds of dollars and end up creating a criminal record for the student.

He said legislators will have to search for a balance between security and smart use of school police. The Houston Democrat hopes to pass a bill this year to stop ticketing for basic misbehavior, and require alternatives for students before schools send them to court.

It used to be a “comforting” to see a police officer at school, Whitmire said. Then cash-strapped schools shed counselors, police stepped in as enforcers, and Texas courts, he said, began to expect revenue from student tickets.

“These police departments have grown and grown, and they have to justify their budgets,” Whitmire added. “They’ve even asked for legislation to be able to go (do enforcement) outside schools.”

But in response to Newtown, Whitmire is co-sponsoring another proposal with state Sen. Tommy Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, to allow districts to try to raise taxes or other revenue to hire more school police or buy security technology.

He’d prefer adding police to arming teachers, Whitmire said, but he’ll “make damn sure,” he said, that more police doesn’t lead to more tickets. 

Mississippi state Democratic Rep. John Hines Sr. is concerned about safety, too. But he’s also trying to get fellow legislators more interested in allegations of a school-to-prison pipeline in his state.

In January, Hines, who chairs the House Youth and Family Affairs Committee, held a state public hearing to discuss the “Handcuffs on Success” report issued that month by the Advancement Project, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and the Mississippi Coalition for the Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse.

The report notes that the Jackson Public Schools District was sued in 2011 in connection to allegations that its students were handcuffed to railings for dress-code violations or refusing to do their schoolwork. Without admitting wrongdoing, the district settled the suit last May with an agreement to stop handcuffing children younger than 13, and to only handcuff older students when they are accused of a crime. A review of Jackson police records shows, according to “Handcuffs on Success,” that 96 percent of student arrests at schools in 2010-11 were for misdemeanors, most for disorderly conduct. Only 4 percent were for suspected felonies.

Hines said he’s also troubled by a lawsuit the U.S. Department of Justice filed last October against Meridian, Miss, alleging that students there “are regularly and repeatedly handcuffed and arrested in school and incarcerated for days at a time without a probable cause hearing.” 

“I want kids safe,” Hines said. “I don’t want people coming off the street or an enraged child shooting people. But I don’t want lots of people all strapped up with guns at our schools either.”

The Meridian Public School District is among the defendants in the DOJ suit, which was filed against the city, the county of Lauderdale and judicial officials as well as the state of Mississippi. School Superintendent Alvin Taylor has said he's working cooperatively with federal investigators but has declined to elaborate. 

In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice noted that Meridian officials sent a letter in September, before the lawsuit was filed, claiming that allegations of violations were "moot" because the city had changed how police officers were to respond to requests from schools for assistance in dealing with a student. The Department of Justice's lawsuit asserts that such changes are not a "permanent" remedy to the allegations of violations of student rights.  

Also in Mississippi, police officers, the school district and employees named in a lawsuit triggered by the bus surveillance video showing officers arresting and threatening black students either denied wrongdoing or knowledge of some of the alleged events. By August the defendants had reached an undisclosed settlement with the plaintiffs, who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Republican Lester “Bubba” Carpenter, who also serves in Mississippi’s House, is sponsoring the proposal to allow districts to designate teachers or employees as a secret “marshals” with permission to bring their own licensed, concealed weapons to school.

Mississippi is a “pretty poor state,” Carpenter said, so the idea is cost-effective. He’s not worried that teachers will panic and shoot in haste. 

“I think they’re smart enough individuals,” Carpenter said. “We trust them with our children every day.”

But Carpenter also supports the proposal to set aside $7.5 million so that schools can apply for $10,000 matching grants to hire police officers. 

“I’ll vote for both of them,” Carpenter said of the proposals. “You can’t get enough security at schools.”

Carpenter said he wasn’t that familiar with the allegations of police excesses alleged in the ACLU and U.S Justice Department lawsuits, or the “Handcuffs on Success” report.

“You’re always going to have a bad apple,” he said.  

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, independent investigative news outlet. For more of its stories on this topic go to publicintegrity.org.

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New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance, at podium, speaks at a press conference on Oct. 12 after 16 members of two East Harlem gun trafficking networks were charged with selling more than 100 illegal firearms, including assault weapons and machine guns.

Criminal gangs in parts of New York City are getting increasingly savvy at carrying out violent crimes and eluding police detection, thanks to a practice of hiding and sharing so-called "community guns," police and prosecutors say.

“They don’t want to keep the weapons on them but want to have access to them,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance. “It poses challenges in terms of prosecution, to the police on the street. It all puts the weapon in the hands of a larger number of people."

Community guns are often used by gang members to enforce drug territory. But several recent shootings have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including children.  Four-year-old Lloyd Morgan was hit by a stray bullet last summer while on a Harlem basketball court with his mom; Zurana Horton, a pregnant mother, was killed by a bullet fired from a community gun last summer. 

Law enforcement surveillance video obtained by the News 4 I-Team shows suspected gang members sharing weapons and hiding them in public places like building mailboxes, garbage cans or under the wheel of a car. 

”They have unique ways of hiding these guns," said Inspector Kevin Catalina. "Every gang member has access.  It can be in a garbage can, under a tree. They go get it, bring it to a location and then carry out the shootings.”

Catalina said gang intelligence units have made more than two dozen arrests and seized more than a dozen guns this past year.  As a result, crime is down – but the community gun problem continues.

“We have a couple of gangs that pose a particular problem for us over here,” said Catalina. He pointed to one crew that uses a .45-caliber weapon to shoot rivals. In one recent shooting, a 10-year-old child was caught in the crossfire in Claremont Park near Webster Avenue, though the child was able to escape unharmed.

Police said gang members know they are under increased surveillance so they take the added measures to try to hide their weapons. Some use children as young as 12 years old to carry weapons for them because they believe police are less likely to stop and question a teen or child. 

“This is the way they operate. It is very rare that one individual will have access to a gun full time,” Catalina said.

Ballistic tests can often match a community gun to a shooting, but finding the shooter can be more difficult, according to Sgt. Richard Zacarese. 

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“Often you’ll recover the gun, and if that gun was used in numerous shootings, the person you caught with it isn’t necessarily the person who used the gun, since it was passed to hand to hand to hand,” said Zacarese.   

Vance highlighted the recent case of Afrika Owes, a 17-year-old prep student who admitted she stored and carried weapons for a violent Harlem drug gang. In prison recordings of phone conversations she had with a gang leader on Rikers Island, she boasted of carrying three guns for the gangs, including a 9 mm. 

Police and prosecutors are now using conspiracy laws to bring cases against suspected gang members who are caught with or are known to have used community guns.

“We are always confronted with a changing crime dynamic,” Vance said. “I think the community gun circumstance is an adaptation to effective prosecution and police action. It’s designed to try to insulate themselves from being caught with weapons on their person."

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Mel Evans / AP

Police are seen in a downtown shopping area in Camden, N.J.

One of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. is getting rid of its police department.

Amid what they call a “public safety crisis,” officials in Camden, N.J., plan to disband the city's 141-year-old police department and replace it with a non-union division of the Camden County Police.

Camden city officials have touted the move as necessary to combat the city’s growing financial and safety problems. The entire 267-member police department will be laid off and replaced with a newly reformatted metro division, which is projected to have some 400 members. It will serve only the city of Camden starting in early 2013.

“It’s not a money-saver, it’s living within the budget you’ve got to get more boots on the ground,” Camden County spokesperson Joyce Gabriel told NBC News. “There has been an uptick in violence this year, and the city decided to go with the county’s police department.”

Camden isn’t the first cash-strapped city to be faced with the decision to eliminate or merge its police department.

Bernard Melekian, director of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office, told NBC News that as communities around the country recover from the recession, police mergers are part of a new reality that will likely continue through the next decade.

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“This really reflects a much broader issue, which is that the economy is changing the delivery of police services profoundly,” Melekian said, “and those agencies undergoing regionalization and consolidation – in particular, smaller ones that are financially distressed – are going to have to find another way of delivering those core services.”

'Recipe for disaster'
Given Camden’s exceptionally high rate of violence (the city recorded this year’s 41st homicide earlier this month), city police officers in danger being laid off say the transition is risky at best.

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“We’re concerned, we’re definitely concerned,” Camden Fraternal Order of Police President John Williamson told NBC News. “You’re going to create a police department and staff it with people who are unfamiliar with the city and say, ‘Go ahead and fight crime.’ That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Afflicted by homelessness, drug trafficking, prostitution, robbery and violence, Camden has consistently ranked high among the top 10 most dangerous cities in the U.S. since 1998, according to Morgan Quitno Press, a research firm that compiles statistical data on cities. In 2010, Camden had the highest crime rate in the U.S., with 2,333 violent crimes per 100,000 people, more than five times the national average.

Camden Mayor Dana Redd underscored the importance of the new, regionalized police force in her proposal for the next fiscal year’s budget.

“The senseless acts of violence occurring in our city affect every one of us,” Redd said in a statement. “We need to assure our residents that all life matters and that we are serious about making our city safe by expanding the number of boots on the ground. This decision to move towards a Camden Metro Division is being made solely on what is right for our residents – nothing more, nothing less.”

Layoffs of the city’s police force will begin by the end of the month, according to the mayor’s office. County officials said that at most 49 percent of the city’s police officers, based on an application process, will be transferred to the new county division under the plan.

Gabriel said the terms of contract for current officers of the city's police department, which include longevity bonuses, day-shift differentials and other costs, make it too expensive to transfer all of them to the new force, so the rest of the Metro Division will be staffed by new hires. Louis Cappelli Jr., director of the Camden County Board of Freeholders, told NBC News that more than 1,500 people from various states and police backgrounds have already applied for the county positions.

The new division, to be fully funded by the city of Camden and the state of New Jersey, will begin field training on the streets as early as October for a period of 17 to 19 weeks.

But no matter how long the training, Rockefeller Institute Director Thomas Gais told NBC News that consolidating into one system and increasing cost-effectiveness takes time.  

“It’s going to be a disruption at least for a while before some kind of consolidation happens, before the reorganization begins to work as intended,” Gais said. “There’s a tradeoff generally in the responsiveness to local needs and efficiency in reallocating resources, so the question becomes whether the reorganization reduces the quality of service and whether the short-term risk is worthwhile in the long run.”

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Gabriel said that cities within Camden County have the option to cede their municipal police force to a county department.

Saving money
Union officials argue that Camden's move is a way for the city to get out of collective bargaining with police. The county's new metro division officers will be non-union members.

The police department in Camden has been under state control since 2005, when then-mayor Gwendolyn Faison called for the takeover. The agreement is set to expire at the end of the year, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has thrown his support behind the transition to county control.

“A county police force that has a reasonable contract and that’s going to provide a huge increase in the number of police officers on the streets here in Camden is a win for everybody,” Christie said at a recent event at Rutgers-Camden University. “I’m willing to put my name on the line for this concept.”

Other state officials have backed similar initiatives.

A 2011 report by the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association, a group representing the nation’s 63 largest police forces, found that 70 percent were consolidating some law enforcement functions to compensate for recent budget cuts.

• Faced with mounting costs and declining revenue, the city of Midvale, Utah, was forced to merge four local police agencies with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department.  
• In Pennsylvania, the state police are increasingly taking on more patrol duties following the recent closures of municipal departments. Since 2010, at least 33 cities scattered throughout the state have closed or scaled back their agencies, according to state records.
• Police agencies in Oakland and Detroit have raised concerns about their ability to respond to routine resident burglaries, theft, and public nuisance calls because they were stretched too thin providing support for other agencies. 

“We’re seeing the economy do a lot of different things to the agencies, which are looking at various forms of consolidation, all of which is driven by the economy,” Melekian said, adding that he knows of at least 100 police agencies around the country undergoing some form of service consolidation.

Cities that have made the switch from municipal to county or regional forces have reported saving millions of dollars and passing grades on the street, but Melekian said a shakeup of the current system in Camden won't eradicate crime or solve budgetary woes.

“The consensus seems to be that this saves money, but it does not produce instantaneous savings,” Melekian said. “There are too many issues that need to be resolved, too many expenses, so at some point they’ll have to work through these inefficiencies before they get the results they want.”

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After a protest by supporters today outside the Rochester, N.Y., Hall of Justice, authorities dropped all charges against Emily Good, 28, who was arrested last month for video recording the police from her front yard and refusing an officer’s order to go into her house, NBC station WHEC reported. 

Good said she was recording a traffic stop in front of her home May 12 because she suspected that the driver, a young black man, was the target of racial profiling.

In a joint statement supporting the decision to drop the charges, Rochester's mayor, City Council president and police chief said today:

"Whatever the outcome of the internal review, we want to make clear that it is not the policy or practice of the Rochester Police Department to prevent citizens from observing its activities — including photographing or videotaping — as long as it does not interfere with the safe conduct of those activities."

Police across the country have come under scrutiny for arresting otherwise uninvolved bystanders who pull out video cameras and phone cameras to document their activities — a practice many civil liberties advocates say is protected because police officers are public officials performing public duties. 

The American Civil Liberties Union contended in an Illinois lawsuit last year that "individuals ... may make audio (and video) recordings of police who are performing their public duties in a public place and speaking in a voice loud enough to be heard by the unassisted human ear."

Other advocates warn that police first have a duty to protect the public — which can include bystanders with cameras, as well as other bystanders who may be imperiled by the officer's distraction with the camera.

"An officer who takes his or her attention away from the task at hand to worry about a person running video is going to suffer from split-attention deficit," Sgt. Ed Flosi of the San Jose, Calif., Police Department told PoliceOne, a journal for law enforcement professionals. "When a person is forced to focus on more than one item, the amount of focus on either item suffers. In other words, they may miss something that the primary suspect(s) is doing that could get them hurt or killed."