Host of CNN’s ‘United Shades’ visits Camden

So I found it somewhat ironic that, of all the national news shows to parachute into Camden and report on its police force, his offered one of the most honest looks at the city, its people and its cops.

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“United Shades of America,” Bell’s hourlong CNN documentary series, explores the country in search of different cultures and subcultures. The comedian (who is black) visited with the Ku Klux Klan, went inside San Quentin Prison and examined what it means to be Latino in the U.S.

Sunday’s episode was shot in 2015, in the immediate aftermath of riots in Baltimore and with the anger over Ferguson, Missouri, still raw. The show is interspersed with footage of Bell’s standup routines on the subject at hand. It may seem hard to make light of racial unrest, poverty and the root causes of conflict between police and minorities, but Bell treats both the cops and the people they serve with the same amount of respect and honesty.

“According to the national news, they’re doing it exactly (the old-fashioned, community-based) way in Camden,” Bell intones as the camera pans across the water tower, Broadway and offers footage of President Obama’s visit last year.

“That’s right, folks,” he jokes as he gets into a Camden County Police cruiser. “I’m going where no other civilian black man has gone before — to the front seat of a police car.”

The streets CNN visits will look familiar to a lot of people in South Jersey: the abandoned buildings, the crosses in memory of murder victims in South Camden, the drug corners.

It’s somewhat familiar territory, too, for CNN viewers — the news network has visited before and has reported on the CCPD before. Like a lot of other South Jersey viewers, I’ve watched some of those reports and read stories in the national news with the sense they oversimplify Camden’s issues. It’s either poverty porn, reaching to the depths of the city’s despair and degradation; or it’s the hokey, hopey stuff about redevelopment and outsiders swooping in and, yes, the police department’s emphasis on outreach.

But what makes Bell’s report different, and oddly, more honest, is that he’s able to inject his opinions into the report even as he acknowledges his own biases.

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In one exchange, a white police officer with Bell talks to a black woman who complains that she called police to report drug dealers on her block, but they didn’t respond quickly enough. The officer tells her that, with a force stretched thin over a city with a lot of crime, her call may have been delayed as police responded to a higher-priority call.

“I’m sure you understand, though, she doesn’t know what the priority is,” Bell tells him. “Nobody tells her what the priority is.”

As the woman tells Bell her issues with the police force, though, he says to her, “He’s here. Please, talk to him.”

And when the woman tells the officer the police can do better by “just being on top of everybody,” Bell says sarcastically what I’m sure the officer might be thinking: “Yeah, just be on top of everybody” — something that’s obviously impossible.

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That’s the kind of honesty a journalist can’t really bring to a straight news report. While we all strive to be objective and see all sides of a given story or issue, we can’t inject our own thoughts (or our sarcasm) into a report.

“A comedian works from his feelings,” Bell told me. “I can say very clearly I have an opinion on something, like when I was talking to people … about the cops. Unlike a journalist, I don’t have to check what someone is telling me. I can accept what I think is true as the truth.”

Bell, who’s lived in urban areas from Berkeley, California, to Mobile, Alabama to the South Side of Chicago, is clear about which side he’s on in the Black Lives Matter movement: “I stand firmly with the black people!” he said with a laugh.

He talks to skeptical Camden residents who watch with bemusement as police approach them to make small talk, and to Colandus “Kelly” Francis of the Camden County NAACP, a frequent critic of the police department and, in particular, its dispensing with a residency requirement for officers.

Still, it’s not a one-sided look by any means.

Bell visits the Camden County Police Academy and talks to recruits. He participates in a virtual reality exercise that simulates an active shooter situation to understand the challenges police face in real-time and real life. He acknowledges the need for police and their place as protectors for the many good people who live in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. And he talks to officers who are minorities, who are from Camden, to get their perspective on both the city and the job they do.

Probably the most compelling scene is when police raid a shooting gallery — an abandoned house that’s used by addicts and dealers. As the chaos unfolds, people in the neighborhood watch police drag addicts out in handcuffs.

Sadly, it’s not an uncommon sight for any of them. But it is for Bell, who becomes emotional at the thought that this is a fact of life for the people who live here.

“I was really taken aback by the people living here — this didn’t happen in some isolated area, there were houses and people looking out their windows and their kids saw all that and see it every day,” Bell told me.

“And then there’s this disgusting crime scene. I have two kids; my youngest was 6 months old when we filmed this. And it hit me: What if this was your life?”

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That same thought occurs to me often as I report in Camden. But it’s not something I can allow to enter into my stories — I have to maintain a veneer of objectivity, of detachment.

I’m also someone who’s been watching Camden and its problems my whole life, and I’ve been reading about or reporting crime in the city and the police department for the better part of the last 16 years. So there’s certainly an element of been-there-seen-that coloring my perceptions.

I asked Bell what he thought of the department as an outsider, and as someone who didn’t have to worry about objectivity or bias in expressing that opinion.

“It feels like a work in progress,” he told me. “They’re still in the relationship-building phase; people are still tentative about it.

“Some white people, I think, think the relationship between black people and the cops is like, we’re making it up or we’re making too much of it, or that the only people who think there’s a problem are criminals anyway.

“But no, this is a broken relationship. And we need to start having these conversations to repair it.”

Still, Bell’s overriding impression of Camden is one that I share.

“People there have this sense of hope, and they know they’re being judged from the outside. But they’re still fighting for their city. They want to figure this out.

“There’s a crisis there, but that’s not all there is to Camden.”

“United Shades of America” airs at 10 p.m. Sunday on CNN.

Phaedra Trethan: (856) 486-2417; [email protected]

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