How Adam Geer went from relative unknown to one of Philly’s most influential public safety leaders

A prosecutor’s routine is grueling in a city like Philadelphia, and Adam Geer lived every inch of it.

To know a heinous crime well enough to prosecute it means understanding all aspects of a case: interviewing a traumatized child victim, studying paperwork that reduces humans to cadavers, watching footage of the moment a bullet pierces a body. Over and over again.

Geer prosecuted sexual assaults and homicides for years and remembers the moment he realized it was time for something new. While delivering a closing argument in a case about a 7-year-old who fell to his death between subway cars while selling candy on a moving train, Geer began crying.

That was three years ago. He moved on to something closer to a bureaucrat’s life, bringing his intimate view of crime to the inspector general’s office. Today, he’s the city’s chief public safety director — a new role at the top of the administration, created to improve cooperation among public safety leaders.

It was a precipitous rise for the 43-year-old Geer.

When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker announced his nomination in December, many in City Hall had never heard of him. He’d spent most of his career as a line prosecutor. When he worked in the Office of the Inspector General, monitoring the city’s public safety programs, at times he struggled to land meetings with political players.

In an administration stacked with officials who had standing relationships with Parker or were well established in City Hall, Geer’s background sets him apart, and it shows in the way he navigates his new role.

When City Council passed controversial legislation last year requiring the mayor hire a chief public safety director, the idea was the person would oversee the administrative side of the police, fire, and prisons departments. Some critics asked: Would it just add another personality to the city’s public safety leadership? Create a power struggle?

That’s not how it’s worked out. Parker has positioned Geer and Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel as equals — Bethel responsible for the police, and Geer in charge of everything else, such as services for victims and antiviolence programming. Both play key roles in major initiatives, including the plan to dismantle the Kensington drug market, but their lanes are clear.

“I remember some folks thinking that there would be a schism between the two,” Parker said in an interview. “But that’s not what you get when we all go in a room. You get consummate professionals.”

Judge Charles Ehrlich, who formerly supervised Geer in the District Attorney’s Office, said his background “in the trenches” should lend him credibility in the new administration.

“He gets the system,” Ehrlich said, “and I think that’s very important in trying to make the kind of changes that the administration is trying to do.”

Geer grew up in a suburb outside Albany, N.Y., in one of his neighborhood’s only Black families. His Jamaican American mother was a social worker hell-bent on building a life around helping people, and Geer felt like his choices in life were to become either a doctor or a lawyer.

He was a self-described “people person,” so law school it was. Geer landed in Philadelphia two decades ago to attend Temple’s James E. Beasley School of Law and stayed. His first job at the District Attorney’s Office was under Lynne Abraham, once dubbed “the deadliest DA” because of how often her office sought the death penalty.

Geer was against capital punishment but wanted to advocate for crime victims. Rather than following a path to the homicide unit, he landed on the family violence and sexual assault team, routinely prosecuting domestic violence cases.

In 2011, Geer left the District Attorney’s Office and spent about four years at a couple of big law firms working on insurance and personal injury cases. That let him pay down his student loans. But he felt pulled back to public service.

“You have to be driven by money to do that work,” he said. “My soul quickly took over.”

Geer spent another six years as a prosecutor under former District Attorney Seth Williams and then under current DA Larry Krasner. He worked cases in municipal court, major crimes, and then landed in the homicide unit. For about a year, he simultaneously oversaw diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the office.

In the aftermath of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, which set off a wave of protests and a national conversation about the role of policing, former Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration added a new job to the Office of the Inspector General, a unique unit inside city government responsible for investigating the executive branch. The hope was that person would improve public trust in local law enforcement.

It was right around the time Geer was ready to leave the prosecutor’s office.

Inspector General Alexander DeSantis said it was a perfect fit. He was looking for someone who wasn’t an ideologue — someone who wouldn’t necessarily come in and suggest disbanding the police department, but someone who could find gaps in how the department serves the community and make recommendations on how to fill them.

Over several years, Geer conducted investigations and drew up reports — some public, others not — about issues ranging from hiring practices to injured-on-duty cops to cleaning up crime scenes. He wrote an op-ed in 2022 saying the city should repeal its residency requirement for police to bolster the ranks, a law Parker had championed when she was in City Council.

“He was one of the first voices in the police oversight space sort of saying, we have to, to some extent, build the police department up,” DeSantis said. “He was a moderate voice internally and had a lot of success.”

Geer said there were challenges. Being in the inspector general’s office means keeping distance from the decision-makers. When he tried to set up meetings to learn about bureaucratic functions, he was at times denied. People questioned his motives.

“I was just one person with the power of the pen,” he said.

Today, he reports directly to the mayor and advises her on public safety, her No. 1 priority.

Having a point person in City Hall who works on public safety isn’t entirely new. Former Mayor Michael Nutter had appointed a deputy mayor for public safety who later became chief of staff. Mayor Jim Kenney’s head of public safety programs reported to the managing director, not the mayor.

Geer’s role is codified in the city’s Home Rule Charter, a document that’s akin to a constitution. He is by law one of the mayor’s closest advisers, confirmed by City Council, unanimously.

Geer now leads the city’s violence intervention programs, victim advocacy, and a grant-making initiative that doles out money to grassroots organizations.

The latter program was pitched as a potential solution to the gun violence crisis but was criticized by the city controller as a rushed process that resulted in delayed payments and confusion. Geer said his office will include new roles to improve public trust in the programs and support of community-based antiviolence groups, including a director of performance management.

Those who have watched Geer through his first six months say his impact is clear.

“Years ago, at the height of some of this violence, people couldn’t be in the same room and work together,” said Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. “I think Geer is now the straw the stirs the drink.”

Or, as Geer would describe it, just a people person.