Could Camden Burn?

Democratic Convention Watch, via nc links:

In Camden, there have been riots before. You could say that while the last actual riots were in 1971, they started in 1967 and smoldered until the city burned in 1971, leading to the final fleeing of Camden's middle class, and white population, out of the city. Today, Camden is an incredibly poor and crime-ridden place. It looks across the river directly at Philadelphia. Assorted sets of statistics place it differently, but normally Camden is considered the most dangerous city in America, or sometimes number 2, and most always in the top 10. These are the 2009 poverty data, and things haven't improved. 36% of the population (and over 50% of all kids) live below the poverty line. Schools are abysmal, and a lot of elected officials end up in jail for extortion, theft, and other crimes against their own city. On top of this, New Jersey has Chris Christie, who has done his level best to make sure that as few pennies as possible end up in Camden's coffers. Especially sad since there is virtually no local tax base.
In January, the Camden police force was cut by half, and the fire department by a third. It has not been pretty. Props to the laid off firemen who actually still show up at the most severe fires just to help. Now, Republican politicians are working to completely dismantle the Camden police force, and replace it with a countywide police department. Some percentage of the county force would be reserved for current Camden cops, who would have to apply. But the force would be deployed countywide. The Camden city government has signed on to this program, since they have virtually no money. The cops are against it. The contention is that local police know what people from the outside do not. And they're right: there is a reason that community policing works as well as it does.
John Timoney has been hired to oversee the police transition. You may remember him from his time in NY, or Miami. I remember him from his time in Philadelphia, especially during the Republican convention in 2000 when he did his best Frank Rizzo imitation and arrested people left and right and stuck them in the Armory. If you don't get the connection, Frank Rizzo was, amoung other things, a Philadelphia cop from the 1940's to the early 1970's, eventually becoming commissioner. In the early 60's he said that he could take a bunch of Philly cops, go down to Cuba and take out Castro. Most people believed he could. He later became mayor of Philadelphia.
Could Camden burn? Absolutely. With a tiny force of cops who know the city, abject poverty, no industry, a non-functional school system, the only choice Timoney will have (and he'll like it, he's practiced in Philadelphia) is thug policing. Which never works for long. It will only take one cop, one misstep, and Camden will destroy the little that is left of it. And Philly will see the flames across the river.

It goes on to discuss the flash mob problem in Philadelphia.  It just bothers me to see the rise in violence and crime which scares the middle class away from the central cities.  Camden is prime real estate directly across from Central City Philadelphia, but it is nearly abandoned.  We need greater density in our cities, and relative progress in the past ten or fifteen years will be blown away by riots and random violence.  We have seemingly been spared the past three years of this Great Recession, but we may now be seeing a return to the days of riot and violence which grew out of the mid 1960s and helped fuel white flight.  Hopefully, the potential danger will pass without releasing, but I don't see any reason to think help is on the way.