SHRINE TIME: THE DARKER SIDE OF ZERO TOLERANCE

SERGEANT Michael Comuso was steering his unmarked patrol car down another
ruined street of broken terrace houses when his headlights picked out a
shadowy group of figures lurking on a derelict porch lit by rows of
flickering candles.

"Shrine time," Comuso grunted. The police car drew up before a pitiful
nocturnal tableau that has become numbingly commonplace on the streets of
Camden, New Jersey, an urban den of drug-addled vice that recently earned
the title of America's most dangerous city.

Hanging across the padlocked front door was a dirty sheet with a message in
indelible ink: "In loving memory of Bryheem". A tangle of brightly coloured
helium balloons bobbed in a frigid breeze. A large white teddy bear leant
against a post. Bottles of beer and spirits stood untouched on the steps.

"The dead guy's friends leave the bottles as a tribute," said Sergeant
Eddie Ramos, one of Comuso's partners in the Camden police department's
sorely stretched shooting response team. "They call them drinks for the dead."

The shrine appeared last week, a few steps from the spot where he died on
Monday. He was Camden's first murder victim of 2005. "Black male, shot at
10 times, hit once," Ramos said tersely.

Comuso turned the corner. Another shrine loomed out of the darkness with
the same bizarre mix of balloons, toys and bottles. The message this time
was: "RIP We love Ed aka The Fat Boy".

"He was shot right in the head," said Comuso. "He died before he hit the
ground."

During the five hours I spent on patrol with Comuso and Ramos one evening
last week, we responded five times to reports of gunfire. One man was shot
in the leg by a mugger. We were called in by traffic police who had stopped
one driver and found a sawn-off shotgun in his car.

Ramos lost a gun-wielding suspect after chasing him on foot into a warren
of alleys. Later we picked up a well-dressed 24-year-old white girl trying
to buy cocaine. Several juvenile offenders were arrested after trying to
dump their drug stashes. Both sergeants described this as one of their
quieter nights.

It is not supposed to be like this in 21st-century America. From the
potholed streets of downtown Camden you can look a short distance across
the Delaware river to the glittering skyline of Philadelphia, one of many
American cities that in recent weeks has been proudly boasting of a
downward trend in violent crime.

Last year in Philadelphia, the number of murders fell to 330 from 348 the
previous year. In Chicago, once notorious as the homicide capital of
America, murders plunged from 598 in 2003 to 447.

There were also falls in New York, Washington, Miami and Las Vegas as zero
tolerance, computerised monitoring and other crime-fighting techniques
appeared to be having a profound impact on American street violence.

The trend has somehow bypassed Camden, where there were 34 murders in 2002,
44 in 2003 and 53 last year. Based on its population of 79,000 people, this
wrecked community suffers more murders per capita than any American city.

"The English immigrants who founded this town named it after Camden in
London," said Ramos. "They would have a heart attack to see these
neighbourhoods now."

Some criminologists suspect that the success of zero tolerance in big
cities may be having the unintended effect of shifting crime elsewhere.
While the murder rate in Washington DC has gone down, the rate in
neighbouring Prince George's County has doubled in the past four years.

Yet Camden's police chief, Edwin Figueroa, has not detected a marked
migration of criminals from Philadelphia. The sorry reality of Camden crime
is that zero tolerance has become almost irrelevant in a city of no more
than nine square miles, every one of them a festering slum. "In theory zero
tolerance is a nice concept," said Comuso. "In reality it's a little hard
to enforce."

Figueroa's police force has neither the manpower nor the resources to
attack more than serious crime. He has lost four of his best officers to
military duty in Iraq. When a serial rapist was finally stopped last week
after three assaults before Christmas, it was not the police who caught
him. He was shot dead by the husband of a fourth woman he tried to attack.

Even if Figueroa had enough men to smother the streets around the clock, he
would have nowhere to put all the criminals. The city jail has long been
full. "You have to prioritise," he said. "You have to put your resources
where they are most needed."

The problem is that resources are needed everywhere, claims the woman who
has become known as Camden's vigilante nun. Sister Helen Cole was a
secondary school teacher before she joined a Catholic order and moved into
the blighted heart of Camden to work at a welfare mission.

When the 1995 murder of a 13-year-old girl named Shaline threatened to
become just another unsolved case, Cole took a personal interest. For five
years she badgered, bullied and harassed the police into keeping their
investigation alive.

Shaline's murderer was eventually jailed, and local prosecutors likened
Cole's tenacity to Charles Bronson, the late Hollywood tough guy famous for
dispensing vigilante justice in his films.

"I didn't know I had it in me," said Cole, who remains one of the few white
faces in a city of mainly poor black and Hispanic residents, many of them
single mothers with little control over their children.

"There are good people here trying to do the right thing," Cole said. "But
the lure of money and drugs is just too great. If your child is involved in
the business, it's hard to turn away when he comes home and puts $100 on
your table. It is our experience that every single street corner in this
city is engaged in criminal activity."

She gets no argument from Ramos, who said there was so much gunfire when
midnight struck on New Year's Eve that the streets of Camden "sounded like
the OK corral".

Not all the news from Camden is bad. Various investment schemes are afoot
to upgrade Camden's waterfront, with its magical views of Philadelphia. The
former RCA factory -- which once built the world's first record player --
has been turned into luxury flats. Someone even wants to build a golf course.

Yet almost every week, they build another shrine. At one point we passed a
new one. The teddy bears and bottles were there, but the banner read, in
awkwardly drawn capitals, "IN LOVING MEMO". The writer had run out of room
for "RY".

America is proud of its falling murder rates, but Camden and other
marginalised cities have little to celebrate and plenty to mourn.