Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker has tapped Kevin Bethel for police commissioner, sources say

Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker will name Kevin J. Bethel as her pick for Philadelphia’s next police commissioner, according to two sources with knowledge of the talks, ushering in a new era for one of the nation’s largest police departments.

Bethel, a former deputy commissioner and the current chief of school safety for the School District of Philadelphia, will be announced Wednesday as the next head of the 5,500-member force. His appointment comes as the Philadelphia Police Department tries to navigate the city out of a three-year wave of gun violence while it has been gripped by low morale and a shortage of nearly 1,000 officers.

The hire is the first staffing decision made by Parker, who won the mayoral election earlier this month and will take office in January. She campaigned on a pledge to end “lawlessness” in the city by hiring hundreds of police officers, increasing the number of cops who patrol on foot and bike, and embracing tough-on-crime tactics such as stop-and-frisk.

A spokesperson for Parker’s transition committee declined to comment Tuesday, other than to say that a news a conference is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

Bethel, 60, has for months been seen as a top candidate. He spent three decades rising through the ranks of the Philadelphia Police Department, culminating in 2008, when then-Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey named him a deputy commissioner charged with leading patrol operations across the entire city.

Bethel also has significant experience in juvenile justice and criminal justice reform, including working with the Stoneleigh Foundation to expand diversion programs for students who commit low-level offenses at school. He’s testified and lectured countless times about reducing the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and he’s well-known in political circles.

Parker has for weeks projected that knowledge of Philadelphia was a key consideration, saying several times that she would pick someone who “doesn’t need a GPS to make it to 52nd and Market.”

During her first news conference after winning the Nov. 7 general election, Parker said she’d make her decision based the candidate’s credentials and his chemistry with other officers.

“They not only need to have the trust of the mayor,” she said, “but they need to have the support of the rank-and-file.”

A spokesperson for the police union declined to comment pending Parker’s formal announcement Wednesday.

Parker considered several candidates, all of whom had ties to the city. They included John M. Stanford, the interim commissioner; deputy commissioner Joel Dales; Joel Fitzgerald Sr., a former Philadelphia police officer who is now chief of police for Denver’s transit system; and Branville Bard, the vice president for public safety at Johns Hopkins University who started his career in Philly.

» READ MORE: Kevin Bethel reshaped Philly’s schools. Here’s a look at his time as the district’s safety chief.

Stanford has been leading the department since September, when Danielle Outlaw abruptly resigned to take a job with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Outlaw, who had never worked in Philadelphia before being hired, was sworn in weeks before the coronavirus pandemic upended daily life and created myriad challenges for policing. The rest of her tenure was marked by mass protests, a staff exodus, and a record-breaking number of shootings and homicides.

Bethel has a national profile and has for years been floated as a candidate for top policing jobs across the country.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum, said his organization, which consults agencies on hiring law enforcement leaders, has “been after Kevin Bethel for years,” trying to get him to interview for a job outside Philadelphia.

“He never applied,” Wexler said. “He was determined to stay in Philadelphia. If he gets the job, Philadelphia will be getting one of the most creative, smart police leaders in the country.”

Wexler said he met Bethel through Ramsey, who was something of a mentor to Bethel. Earlier this year, Ramsey described Bethel as “a right arm to me” during the eight years the two worked in top department leadership.

”I was usually the first one in and the last one out [of headquarters] at night,” Ramsey said. “If anyone was still in the office, it would be Bethel, going over crime numbers. He is absolutely driven when it comes to fighting crime.”

Bethel is the second of Ramsey’s deputies to ascend to commissioner. Mayor Jim Kenney’s first pick to lead the department in 2016 was Richard Ross, another one of Ramsey’s top advisers. Ross resigned in 2019 amid allegations he retaliated against another officer with whom he’d had an affair.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter, who hired Ramsey, said Ramsey and Bethel are similar “philosophically, strategically, and mindset-wise.”

”Everybody has to be their own person, and nobody is going to be the second coming of anybody else,” Nutter said. “[But] there’s a lot of agreement in how they conduct themselves, how they would go about doing the work.”

He added: “There’s no one more serious than Kevin Bethel about public safety.”

Bethel will inherit a police department that is “in need of leadership and a clear strategic direction,” said Jerry Ratcliffe, a Temple University criminologist who has studied and consulted the department.

Ratcliffe said no one should expect a “quick” turnaround given deep challenges related to staffing and morale, but he said Bethel has many of the qualities required to be an effective commissioner.

“He knows when to double down and support the police department and say ‘no, this is the right thing to do,’ even if it’s not popular,” Ratcliffe said. “And he knows when to own it and say ‘yeah, as a police department, we could have done that better.’ There’s a balancing act there.”

Staffing is among the department’s most urgent challenges. Like many other industries and city agencies, the police department bled officers during the pandemic, losing hundreds to retirement and resignation. At the same time, hundreds of cops were out of work on injury leave — some of whom were abusing the program.

Outlaw blamed the political environment and a perceived lack of support for police after the protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. She said the problem was exacerbated by a 2020 rule that was championed by Parker and required most municipal workers to live in the city for a year before applying for a job.

That rule was waived for police recruits in early 2022. Despite millions of dollars in new funding to support hiring efforts, there are still about 900 officer vacancies and hundreds are expected to retire in the next four years.

» READ MORE: Philly Police Dept. has inconsistent strategies, slow response times, and outdated systems, city controller says

That attrition came as the city was gripped by record-setting rates of shootings and homicides in 2021 and 2022, leaving more than 1,000 people dead over two years. Thousands more people were shot and survived, and the violence has been intensely concentrated in some of Philadelphia’s most disadvantaged communities.

Gun violence rates have improved markedly this year. Police statistics show homicides are down about 30% compared to the same time last year, an encouraging sign — but the 372 people killed this year is still higher than at almost any other point in the last 15 years.

In addition, there have been nearly 1,200 nonfatal shootings this year, an improvement from the unprecedented heights recorded during the pandemic, but still higher than in the years leading up to the 2020 spike.

Wexler said he’s confident in Bethel, who is “the kind of person that won’t have traditional responses to problems.”

“He’s more of a problem-solver,” he said. “He’ll put a lot of emphasis on prevention, but he will also recognize that something needs to be done about Philadelphia’s crime problem.”