CAMDEN, N.J. — Every few months, the police chief here asks which officers wrote the most tickets.

Elsewhere, this might lead to praise, but in Camden — where 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line, the murder rate compares to that of El Salvador and one of the most interesting experiments in American policing is underway — Chief J. Scott Thomson sees aggressive ticket writing as a sign that his officers don’t get the new program.

“Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year” — around the per capita income in the city — “can be life altering,” Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver’s license. “Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger.”

Handling more vehicle stops with a warning, rather than a ticket, is one element of Chief Thomson’s new approach, which, for lack of another name, might be called the Hippocratic ethos of policing: Minimize harm, and try to save lives.