“WE REALIZE THAT THE KEY TO
OUR PROBLEMS … IS NOT TO GO OUT
AND ARREST EVERYONE.”
many of them fresh from the academy, sparking widespread community
angst. That year, Newark saw a spike
in homicides that again drove its
murder rate up among the very highest in the country, right alongside
New Orleans, Detroit and Baltimore.
The police layoffs came just as
New Jersey’s governor and legislature slashed education spending
throughout the state, including in
Newark. The cuts may be a onetwo punch for New Jersey’s at-risk
youth, some experts fear.
“Why would you decide that the first
thing you want to cut is police and education?” says Brendan O’Flaherty, an
economics professor at Columbia University who specializes in urban issues.
“You’re eating the young.”
The task of running Newark’s depleted police department falls to
Samuel DeMaio, who rose from beat
cop to police director over 25 years
at the agency. DeMaio, 44, is a compact man with a neatly trimmed goatee and salt-and-pepper hair, who
speaks in a gravely, rapid-fire patter.
He took over as police director in
June 2011, at the beginning of one of
the worst sustained outbreak of violence in 20 years. By that summer’s
end, 32 people were dead.
Violent crime eased somewhat
since then, but not the department’s
fiscal woes.
“If you look at the number of cops
that we have today, it’s the same number that we had in the late 70s,” he
says. “Two years ago there was an overtime budget for the police department
of $20 million. Now it’s $4 million.”
An investment in cutting-edge
technologies like gun-shot detectors
and surveillance cameras is helping
the department better deploy its resources. In response to falling manpower, DeMaio also pulled cops out
of precinct houses and headquarters and sent them into the streets.
Cops once behind desks now ride in
radio cars, day and night, or patrol
high-crime areas in specialized drug
and gang units. The shift means that
property crimes like break-ins and
thefts often get just a cursory review by investigators, according to