Philly Police Department will remain accredited. Its status had been challenged over a new city law.

POCONO MANOR, Pa. — The Philadelphia Police Department will retain its statewide accreditation after a panel on Tuesday backed away from a judgment that a new city law barring officers from stopping motorists for minor infractions like a broken taillight violated rules for granting stamps of approval to police forces.

The accreditation had been in jeopardy since the spring, when a key official with the Pennsylvania Law Enforcement Accreditation Commission (PLEAC), a group made up mostly of police chiefs from smaller communities, wrote the department to say the city measure could have prevented the Police Department and its 6,000 officers from enforcing aspects of the state’s vehicle code.

» READ MORE: Philly police might be stripped of a statewide accreditation. The agency in charge blames a new city law.

On Tuesday, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw told the accreditation commission at a meeting of the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association in the Poconos that the department disagreed with that interpretation. She insisted the measure known as the Driving Equality Law only modified police conduct but did not ban officers from pulling a car over.

The law and a companion executive order from Mayor Jim Kenney reclassified eight minor driving infractions as “secondary violations,” which cannot be the sole reason an officer stops a vehicle. Outlaw, joined by Staff Inspector Francis Healy, the department’s top legal adviser, told the commission that officers can still pull drivers over for more serious offenses and cite them for those and any less serious ones.

And they said the ordinance was designed to address racial disparities in car stops for minor violations — a phenomenon critics had come to call “driving while Black.”

“We are trying to address the disparities without impacting our ability to enforce the law,” Healy said.

If the accreditation panel still disagreed, Outlaw said, the department wanted to be granted a waiver from the rule at issue.

In the end, that wasn’t necessary. The panel members reaffirmed the department’s accreditation in a 10-8 vote, saying they accepted Outlaw’s argument.

City data show that although vehicle stops dropped precipitously in 2020 during the pandemic, and have not returned to pre-2020 heights, officers this June stopped about 8,500 motorists — 3% less than in September 2021, just before the law passed. Even apart from the new law, police stops of people on foot and in cars have been declining dramatically in Philadelphia since 2015 — in large part because of a legal challenge by the ACLU.

The threat against accreditation was not the first brush with controversy for the Driving Equality law, which was championed by City Councilmember Isaiah Thomas. Not long after the bill passed, the police officers’ union sued to overturn it, saying it violates state law and adversely affects public safety. And in Harrisburg, Republican lawmakers added an amendment to pending traffic enforcement legislation that could force cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to choose between safer bike lanes and driving equity laws.

» READ MORE: Philly has become the first big city to ban minor traffic stops said to criminalize ‘driving while Black’

Some on the commission, including member Frank Lavery Jr., who is also the lawyer for the police chiefs’ group, said Philadelphia law meant the Police Department was clearly failing to uphold the standards necessary to remain accredited alongside other law enforcement agencies.

“What Philadelphia is trying to do is carve out its own exception,” Lavery told his fellow panel members Tuesday.

The Police Department first earned accreditation in 2015 under then-Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey. The effort took three years and involved revising policies, standardizing training programs, and updating technical capabilities.

The Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association said nearly 150 agencies statewide are currently accredited, including police departments in Harrisburg, Allentown, Bensalem, and State College.

A letter raising doubts about accreditation was sent to Outlaw by James Adams, the former police chief of a small town in Cumberland County who is now the accreditation program coordinator. After the vote Tuesday, he said he was surprised since “everyone I talked to on the commission” agreed that the city police force was out of compliance.

The commission sent a similar letter to Pittsburgh police. The City Council there also passed a law, in December, to limit police stops.

The accreditation panel met behind closed doors later Tuesday to discuss Pittsburgh’s accreditation status. Lavery said the group was not required to discuss issues in public. “This is not a public organization,” he said.

Adams said he would not be available to disclose the panel’s decision until Aug. 2.

Staff writer Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.