Philly’s Top Cop Talks Plummeting Homicides, Horrible Drivers, and ICE Raids

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel / Photograph by Kyle Kielinski

He started as a beat cop in 1986 after dropping out of Temple. Nearly 40 years later, he’s at the helm of the force at a time when homicides are set to hit record lows, even as the perception of Philadelphia as a place where “bad things happen” persists. Here, Kevin Bethel explains what the department is doing right and what it so desperately needs (you!), and pushes back on our suggestion that Kensington is as bad as it ever was.

Good morning, sir.
Hey, man. Good morning. How are you doing?

I think you could say that I’m hanging in there. Thank you for asking. I’m curious — what time does the police commissioner of the sixth-largest city in the nation have to set his alarm for in the morning?
Oh, man. Well, I’m up around five, try to do a workout [laughs], on the road at a quarter to seven, and get here no later than 7:25, in plenty of time for the 8:10 call.

8:10 call?
That’s a call I do with all of the commanders in the field reporting out any incidents, any trends; we do district reports. There are about 160 of us on the call. It’s important to keep everybody engaged and have everybody knowing what happens everywhere in the city.

Your official bio says you live in Philly, but I seem to have found a home you own in North Wales.
Well, I moved to North Wales but then moved back into the city. I lived downtown at 16th and Race for a year but wasn’t fond of that at all, and so I got a place in Roxborough. My daughter’s my landlord! And my wife is still out in North Wales.

You originally came from Southwest Philly and grew up in the 1960s at a time when the distrust of cops was becoming a real “thing.” What was your family’s position on policing?
Listen, I was born in 1963 and grew up with the following three pictures on the wall: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, and JFK. I started out at Catholic school, where we read the Ten Commandments every day. I was an altar boy. My point is that I was taught respect. At home and at school. Respect for all adults, police or no police. I also didn’t have any negative interactions with the police, though certainly some in my neighborhood did. My impression was always that if you weren’t doing anything wrong, the cops left you alone, but if you were doing stuff, the cops would be on you.

So did you grow up wanting to be a cop?
Not at all, man. I went to Temple for a year but didn’t make it through, so I dropped out of college and was then working two jobs, one at UPS and one as a porter and laborer at Misericordia Hospital. This was the early ’80s. Then came the consent decree, where the department was actively recruiting more officers of color. I saw a couple of my friends going to the academy, and I said, you know what, let me give this a shot. That was 1986. Best decision I ever made in my life. And years later I went back to college, and then got my master’s at St. Joe’s.

What did your earliest years as a cop teach you?
My dad left my life when I was nine, and my mother worked very hard to raise four boys. We were evicted twice. And I used to think we were poor. But then I became a cop and started walking through the doors of people in the community and realized, oh shit, I am not poor at all. It wasn’t until then that I really understood poverty.

And what’s the biggest change for the better between being a cop in 1986 and in 2025?
There is a lot, but I have to say the technology. I remember reading years ago about how one day we were going to have this or that. It was George Jetson stuff. That’s never gonna happen! And now I look at the technology we have today. It’s just amazing.

The worst?
I wouldn’t use the word worst but … we are one of the most powerful entities in the world. We have the ability to walk up and take somebody’s liberty away. The president of the United States cannot do that. We can —

— Er, I think the president thinks he probably can do that.
[Laughs] You’ll notice I didn’t name a president. But when I originally left the force in 2016 for the first time, I felt like we were hitting our stride and doing enforcement the way we should. We had a great relationship with the community. So then to watch the profession be vilified, to see all the defund the police stuff, that was hard. We lost the trust of the community, but then again, they do not trust anybody. They don’t trust politicians. They don’t trust doctors. Nobody. But I think we are starting to turn things around and hope that we never go into that dark space again.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel speaks with reporters after an April shooting. / Photograph by Ryan Collerd/Getty Images

We’re on track to end 2025 with fewer than 240 homicides. Should that happen, this would be the lowest number of homicides we’ve seen since LBJ was in the White House, and drastically fewer than the hellscape that Philly was in 2021, when we hit 562. I realize that we’re seeing homicide rates fall similarly in other major cities around the country, but what are we doing right here?
There are many factors. You have to remember that when we hit 562 — I wasn’t here then, as I was the chief of school safety for the district — we had lost so many men and women from the department. Staffing continues to be a problem, and we are still 1,000 officers short of where we need to be, which is 6,300, but since I arrived, we keep graduating officers from the academy.

So more police on the street. What else?
You have to look at our improved clearance rates in both homicides and nonfatal shootings. This is one of the key reasons that numbers are dropping in those areas.

You’re talking about the percentage of cases solved.
Yes. It’s one of the main ways a department measures investigative effectiveness and community cooperation. During COVID, our clearance rates for homicides were hovering between 40 and 50 percent after years of averaging in the 60s. Meanwhile, our nonfatal shooting clearance rates were between 10 and 15 percent.

I had no idea they were so low.
Well, as of today, our homicide clearance rate is at 84 percent, and our nonfatal shooting clearance rate is around 40 percent. Those are huge jumps. Our best numbers in decades. And since nonfatal shootings could lead to homicides, making arrests quickly in those cases helps prevent retaliation and future violence.

Why did the department suddenly get so much better at solving serious crimes?
In part, advances in technology. Then there is the creation of our Shooting Investigations Group, which focuses almost exclusively on nonfatal shootings. Also, we have more time and resources to properly handle each case. During COVID, our investigative capacity was stretched to the limit.

Clearly, what you are doing is working. One area where your department could really use improvement is traffic enforcement. I drive in the city almost daily, and since COVID, it’s just become the Wild West. People do not care about traffic laws or safety. We’re never going to achieve the Vision Zero goal of zero traffic deaths with people flouting the traffic laws so egregiously.
I fully understand. I hear the complaints often. It will take a process. We need to meet our staffing goals. And also, please understand that we are serving 1.4 million people over 135 square miles. We get 2.5 million calls annually into our 911 system. So we are trying to balance all of that. We are working to reset the norms.

I hear that, but I see cars literally blowing through red lights — not pink lights! — and thundering down Walnut Street in West Philly at 50-plus miles per hour, right past cops who do not turn on their lights or do a thing. What gives?
Again, there are the realities of our staffing issues. And we need to make a decision of whether we make a car stop that involves two officers and takes a period of time when 911 is being flooded with other kinds of calls. We have to prioritize.

What do you bring from the school district into your role as commissioner?
We have a plethora of community members out there working with young people to make sure they are in the right direction. We know that within two hours after school within one mile of the school presents the greatest danger to juveniles, and this is why PAL and programs like it are so important.

Some believe that due to leadership changes at ICE on the local level, Philadelphia could experience some of the more extreme ICE activity that we’ve seen around the country. How exactly is the Philadelphia Police Department interacting with ICE, if at all, and how will you in the future?
More than 20 years ago, the commissioner at the time recognized that we needed to work with the immigrant community. We realized that many people from that community were not reporting offenses because they were scared. So we have built strong relationships with the immigrant community. We do not and will not enforce immigration laws. That said, we recognize that ICE agents are coming under attack, and we are charged as law enforcement to protect everyone — citizens of Philadelphia and others. Fortunately, we have not encountered those scenarios where ICE has come under attack.

What about protecting immigrants who’ve done nothing illegal but seek their shot at the so-called American dream?
Listen, man. I will say to you that I do not have control of federal law enforcement. But I fully expect that my colleagues in all of law enforcement, including immigration, will abide by the laws and systems and processes that we have in place. There are checks and balances to deal with inappropriate behavior and operating outside the boundaries.

It feels like there are fewer and fewer checks and balances, federally.
I understand the frustration.

Speaking of frustration: shoplifting. It’s flagrant and seems to go virtually unchecked. One common narrative I hear is that cops don’t bother making arrests in shoplifting cases — and stores don’t even bother calling 911 — because the DA’s office isn’t going to do anything about it. Fair?
It was fair at one point, but in 2024, we made a full effort to reengage our business communities and also worked with the DA’s office to set up a task force. We started to go after prolific thieves and rings, recognizing that there is a big difference between stealing a $2 candy bar and stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of merchandise over a period of time.And we realized that 25 individuals were responsible for 70 percent of retail theft in Center City. We told the business owners that we wanted them to call us and that we wanted to identify core individuals. So you actually saw the “incidents” of retail theft go up because we pushed them to report. We will never stop retail theft, but we are doing what we can to minimize it.

One of your biggest chal­lenges is Kensington, and we’ve now had a deputy police commissioner whose only responsibility is Kensington for almost two years. But I don’t know. I’m in Kensington a fair amount, and I just had a walk around the other day. And I have to say, I’m still seeing people defecating on the street. I’m still seeing people buying drugs in the open and with needles in their toes. And I’m still seeing prodigious amounts of prostitution going unchecked. Don’t get me wrong: There are more cops. But what are they actually doing?
I don’t know where specifically you go, but I get down there quite often, and it seems far different. It’s better than it was, and I am not seeing that level of what you describe. And I believe that with what we are doing and with what others are doing in terms of prevention and intervention and with what those in the health community are doing, we are going to win down there.

So in 10 years, Kensington is going to be a completely different place?
Man, 10 years is too long for me! We are going to stay the course and stay focused on the work. We are down in the community every single day. And we are feeling shifts. We are creating order. The best policing is when communities police themselves, and so we are working to build the community.

So murders are way, way down and crime, overall, is getting better. Kensington is going to be the next hot neighborhood. What do you say to suburbanites who still refuse to come to dinner or see a show in the city?
You can’t go through challenging years and all the shootings and not have that perception out there. But we are changing those perceptions. We are cheerleading the city. We are just going to put our foot on the gas and keep pressing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Published as “Top Cop” in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.