Philly Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel has been trying to bring change to a stubborn department

Kevin Bethel was trying something new.

Inside a lecture hall at the University of Pennsylvania earlier this month, the city’s police commissioner addressed a few dozen members of his command staff — but not about weekly crime stats or staffing issues.

Instead, he spoke about leadership development, professional growth, and executive coaching — concepts central to a newly developed, three-day seminar that commanders were about to go through with a series of outside experts and moderators.

“The service part of our work, the leadership part of our work, has to change,” Bethel told those in the room. “We are stifling ourselves. We are not going to get better until we train ourselves as leaders to think differently, open our minds to do things differently, and progress.”

The new program came amid familiar challenges for the city’s top cop. Just days earlier, 25 people were shot across the city in a single weekend, including two 14-year-old boys outside Christmas Village at City Hall.

At a news conference afterward, a defiant Bethel, standing in the rain at Dilworth Park, told reporters: “I commit to you: This is not the norm.”

New initiatives, stubborn problems: Such has been the story of Bethel’s first year in charge.

Every police commissioner in recent memory has approached the job differently. Charles Ramsey, more than a decade ago, was an outspoken changemaker; his successor, Richard Ross, was viewed as a steady hand; and Danielle Outlaw became the reluctant face of a department facing a variety of pandemic-era crises.

For 12 months, Bethel’s tenure has been marked by a striking decline in gun violence — a phenomenon that has been seen across the country and that experts say defies simple explanation.

Against that backdrop, Bethel, 61, has emerged as a leader interested in seeking out new approaches for his 5,600-officer department, while also navigating — or otherwise not yet changing — much of what came before him.

Key stakeholders and community members describe him as deliberate and self-assured, and an Inquirer analysis of a variety of police metrics shows how he’s seeking to affect the department — and underscores the limits of how quickly he can do so.

Pedestrian stops and overall arrests, for example — which can fluctuate depending on how a commissioner directs his officers to act — have remained well below pre-pandemic norms.

Two other discretionary tactics, meanwhile, have gone in divergent directions: Illegal-gun arrests have fallen by about 10% compared to last year, while car stops are up by nearly a third.

Some smaller-scale metrics have exploded in part simply because Bethel is asking officers to track them. Police have recorded more than 82,000 “business checks” this year — a 4,000% increase over last year — because Bethel said he has asked officers to conduct those routine check-ins on shops and businesses more often and to log them.

Seizures of ATVs and dirt bikes are up 244%, part of a concerted effort to address their illegal use on city streets.

And the department has conducted more than 7,000 SEPTA checks, a new initiative in which city officers step onto buses or trains as a complement to the transit agency’s police force. Bethel said police began doing that a few months ago to bolster a sense of safety for staff and riders.

Then there’s the leadership training.

Despite the department’s $900 million annual budget, it has provided little to no professional development over the years for those climbing the ranks. Bethel — who spent three decades on the force before taking a seven-year hiatus, including a stint as the Philadelphia School District’s safety chief — said he noticed during his time away from policing that other organizations were more intentional about cultivating leadership skills.

The three-day seminars conducted at Penn this fall — developed with funding from the Neubauer Family Foundation and its chairman, former Aramark CEO Joseph Neubauer — were a first step at changing that. Starting this fall, Neubauer will also provide funding for 15 commanders to receive master’s degrees in management from Penn’s criminology department.

“I want to shake it up. I want to try different things,” Bethel said in an interview earlier this month at Police Headquarters. Shortly after being sworn in, he said, he had a list of more than 300 changes he wanted to make across the agency. “And so I’m pushing the department probably harder than they’ve had in a long time. And I don’t say that out of arrogance. People know — that’s just what I do.”

Still, not all change comes quickly or evenly.

When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker was on the campaign trail last year, she said police should not be discouraged from using stop-and-frisk as a crime-fighting tactic despite its controversial history. The American Civil Liberties Union sued in 2010 because police were overwhelmingly stopping people of color, often without legal justification. The city agreed to let the ACLU monitor the practice, but racial disparities have persisted.

Through early December, however, the rate of such stops this year had barely budged.

According to figures the police department provided in mid-December, officers this year stopped around 12,000 people on foot, a number that rivals the lowest pace in recent memory. As recently as 2019, city data show, officers were stopping six times as many pedestrians each year.

Bethel said that Parker never instructed him to boost stops by a certain amount, and that her goal was to “set a tone” that police should be able to use every legal tool available to address crime. He added that police now lean heavily on technology and data to ensure they are focused and precise about where they patrol, rather than engaging in “over-policing” by stopping huge numbers of people on the streets.

“The mayor did not come in and say: ‘Hey, Kevin, go out there and tell everybody to just start grabbing [people],’” he said. “I think what we do is be very strategic in how we engage individuals in our work.”

By contrast, vehicle stops are on the rise, on pace to be at their highest level in three years.

That tally — likely to be around 150,000 stops by year’s end — will still be about half of what it was before the pandemic. But officers this year nearly doubled the number of people pulled over for having invalid license plates, and also boosted stops for categories including running a red light or disobeying other traffic signals.

Bethel said he has asked officers to be more vigilant in stopping erratic drivers, including with targeted initiatives on busy thoroughfares including North Broad Street, Aramingo Avenue, and Castor Avenue. The goal, he said, was to address a surge in recent traffic-related deaths that have killed dozens of drivers and pedestrians.

When gun violence rose during the pandemic, one measure police repeatedly touted as a success was a similar spike in illegal-gun arrests — proof, they said, that officers were being proactive in seeking to combat the use of firearms.

This year, however, arrests for illegal guns are down by about 10% compared with last year, and on pace to be at their lowest level since before the pandemic.

And Bethel said he’s actually encouraged by that.

The commissioner said he didn’t believe the drop reflected a lack of activity by police. Instead, he said, it could be a signal that the lower level of violence on the streets means fewer people feel the need to carry a weapon.

“Right now, things are lining up: We’re seeing fewer guns, fewer shootings, fewer homicides, fewer robberies,” he said. And while one year may not be long enough to know if the trend will hold, he added, “I pray that we are seeing a downward trend in folks who … carry a gun, because during the highest surge, everybody had a gun.”

Other categories of arrests have increased this year, the department said: Arrests for violent crimes were up 9% over last year’s pace, and property-crime arrests were up 23%.

And the clearance rates for homicides and nonfatal shootings — the percentage of cases considered solved, typically by arrest — were at yearslong highs, at more than 70% and 35% respectively, the department said.

Some of that can be attributed to the decreasing number of cases. With fewer cases to solve, Bethel said, detectives have more time to work on each one. And every arrest in a crime of violence, he said, sends a message that “we’re never going to stop.”

Change can take time to be felt in the community, especially in Philadelphia, where decades of police scandals have led to a deep well of mistrust among many residents.

Tyrone Sims, 72, a longtime community activist in Cobbs Creek, said he doesn’t feel that the view of police from the neighborhood has evolved much during Bethel’s first year. But he doesn’t place all the blame on the commissioner — whom he respects and has known since he taught at John Bartram High School when Bethel was a student.

The problems, he said, are long-standing. Schedules of captains and patrol officers in his neighborhood district consistently change, he said, making it hard for residents to get to know officers. And many cops who work patrol can be uptight, he said, sometimes overreacting if a young person makes a joke or lobs an insult, rather than seeking to de-escalate a situation.

Bethel said he knows the department isn’t perfect. But after several years of overlapping crises — COVID-19, the surge in shootings, widespread unrest — he believes police can get back to what he calls the “blocking and tackling” of the job: focusing on service and seeking to help the community.

And that, Bethel said, can allow him to focus on what he wants to do most: “force the system to move forward, instead of just churning in place.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the department at the University of Pennsylvania that will offer master’s degrees to commanders. It is the Department of Criminology.