Police statistics show 203 Black people died from gunshots in Philadelphia in 2024 — almost two-thirds the number who died in 2023 — as the city experienced an almost 10-year low in fatal shootings.
Community activists, city officials and experts agree that a number of factors contributed to the decline, and some of the most important were the city’s unprecedented investment in and collaboration on violence prevention efforts.
There’s hope that what happened last year can be replicated in 2025, but all hands will have to remain on deck, they argued, to save lives.
“We cannot and will not police our way out of our problems,” Mayor Cherelle Parker said during her State of the City address in December. “My public safety strategy is anchored by PIE — Prevention, Intervention and Enforcement — and it’s working.”
Parker has continued investments, which began under former Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, in modern policing tactics, intervention programs and community groups focused on anti-violence efforts.
District Attorney Larry Krasner said the city needs to build on its successes “by investing in what has worked.”
“Modern law enforcement requires investment,” he said. “Prevention requires investment. The mayor sometimes talks about intervention. That requires investment.”The investments shouldn’t just be monetary, community activists said.“The community needs to get involved,” said Dorothy Johnson-Speight, founder and national executive director of Mothers in Charge.
Johnson-Speight lost her son, Khaaliq Jabbar, to gun violence in 2001, after a dispute over a parking spot.“There are many organizations on the ground that could do more if they had more resources and more people getting involved,” she said.
City’s historic rise in shootings Philadelphia has always ranked among the top five large cities for homicides, said Caterina Roman, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University.
“If you looked at homicides over the last 20 years, Philadelphia is always high,” she said. “In the ‘90s, early 2000s, violence was high everywhere and particularly high in Philadelphia.”
By the mid ‘00s, Roman said, “New York figured things out. Los Angeles figured things out. Things are still high [in Philadelphia] until Commissioner Ramsey came in. He did more community policing, more hot spots policing, more focused deterrence.”
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Philadelphia police employed the controversial tactic of stop-and-frisk, which often involved racially profiling Black and Latino men.
Violent crime remained low in Philadelphia for a few years and then gradually started to tick up. In 2018, 353 people died in shootings in the city — at that time a 10-year high. More than 80% of those who died were Black.
Police said at the time that the violence was related to the opioid epidemic.
When the COVID pandemic began early in 2020, schools, businesses, courts and churches closed for months. People were out of work and not getting unemployment compensation because a surge in unemployment claims created a backlog, so they sought other ways — legal and illegal — to make money.
Data shows that neighborhoods with drug markets had the highest increases in gun violence, Roman said. One of Roman’s students has hypothesized that new potential drug sellers were entering those markets, which disrupted established territories and started fights.
Kids were cut off from sports and other after-school activities. And people were cut off from social services.
The number of homicides climbed, reaching a peak of 562 in 2021. About 81% of those who died were Black. It was one of the largest increases in homicides of any city across the country, Roman said.Philadelphia’s historic decline in shootingsThe number of homicides in Philadelphia dropped to 516 in 2022 and 409 in 2023, according to police data. It then dropped by almost 37% to 269 in 2024.Just as a number of factors contributed to the increase in shootings, a number of factors contributed to the decrease.“I think there’s little question that the reopening of society nationally and locally has had a tremendous impact,” Krasner said.“A lot of the lesson of the pandemic is that when you strip away the minimal investment in social services … strip away classrooms, summer camps, houses of worship, organized sports … when you take all those things away, we have learned, young people are going to kill young people.”
But also, in those years when the number of shootings climbed, everyone was “getting smarter on how to reduce gun violence,” Roman said. “We’re understanding how to connect the dots. We’re understanding how to use data to target individuals who might need services. We’re catching perpetrators.” The city’s homicide clearance rate has almost doubled under Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel. Police closed about 37% of shooting cases in 2020, according to data from the city controller’s office, and more than 70% in 2024.
Philadelphia’s historic investments in gun violence preventionFormer Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration and City Council invested nearly $600 million in gun violence prevention efforts from 2022 to 2024 — more than any previous administration in the city’s history.
The city made investments in its own policing efforts, including $9.2 million over five years for Operation Pinpoint, a program that uses modern technology to identify where shootings have occurred and are likely to occur. It also dedicated $1 million over five years for recruitment efforts.
The city dedicated $9 million to expand Group Violence Intervention, a program that identifies groups of people who are likely to commit violent crimes and engages members to offer help. In 2024, GVI added programming focused on helping juveniles.
The city allocated $18.5 million to the Community Crisis Intervention Program, run by law enforcement officials and members of the Philadelphia Anti-Drug Anti-violence Network, or PAAN. The program uses “credible messengers” to intervene in and mediate conflict in come of the city’s more violent neighborhoods. The city also made significant investments in what City Council President Kenyatta Johnson called “boots on the ground organizations.”
Johnson said many of these organizations had previously been funding their work “out of their own pockets.”
The District Attorney’s Office and the Philadelphia Foundation in 2021 launched the office’s Violence Prevention Grant Program. The program has awarded nearly $4 million in small grants to dozens of community groups focused on violence prevention efforts.
At the same time that city officials were making these significant investments, the Philadelphia Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the Urban Affairs Coalition, the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Equity Alliance began working together to create the Civic Coalition to Save Lives.
The coalition raised $1.5 million in philanthropic contributions, which it has distributed to a variety of programs across the city. Executive Director David Brown said the organization has tried to make investments “in areas where some of our partners could not necessarily get funding,” such as administrative support so activists could spend more time providing services and less time doing paperwork. The Philadelphia Police Department, the DA’s office and community groups across the city have also invested more time into working together.
“This last year, we’ve had more meetings with the Philadelphia Police Department than I think I’ve ever had in my life,” said Johnson-Speight, of Mothers in Charge. She has been working in violence prevention for more than 20 years.
In those meetings, Johnson-Speight said, the police “get a chance to hear the voices of families who’ve been impacted by violence. A lot of times those people know who committed a murder. They want to work with the police. And now the police are working with the community.” Bilal Qayyum, president of the Father’s Day Rally Committee, said he believes the collaboration and financial investment in community groups has had the biggest impact on the number of homicides in Philadelphia. “I work very closely with the police; they’re great. The commissioner is great. People have a tendency to think that crime drops with the police, but that’s not necessarily so. Police respond to the crime, not necessarily stop it,” he said.
“Why I think violence has been reduced is because of the groups on the ground doing the work.”
Plans to keep gun deaths down in 2025 City leaders, activists and experts agree that they all need to continue to work together and the city needs to continue to make significant investments in violence prevention.“Don’t just go back to the investment we made in that before,” Krasner said. “Double it. Triple it. Go in big. Deep investment in young people is very profitable in terms of public safety, in terms of people’s sense of well-being, in terms of property values, in terms of people’s ability to do business.”
Bethel told The Tribune in December that he plans to add victim advocates within the police department to offer “targeted support and care to those directly impacted by crime.”
He said the department will also implement new technologies to make it more efficient, transparent and responsive. Krasner said the city really needs a state-of-the-art forensics lab.
The state gave the city $25 million in 2022 to expand the police department’s existing forensics lab. Kenney previously set aside money in the city budget for the project, but a timeline remains unclear. “If we can’t get it online tomorrow because it’s going to be a big construction project and everybody’s going to fight over where it is and who gets to build it, we need to outsource those services now,” Krasner said.“People stop committing crimes when they believe they’re going to get caught.”
The district attorney also said he would like to see the state invest more in Philadelphia’s schools. “That’s how you stop crime,” he said, “when you have kids who are succeeding.”
The Civic Coalition to Save Lives is continuing to raise money, Brown said, with the hope of being able to give out as much this June as it did in June 2024. Brown said the organization plans to focus on affordable housing and workforce development, and get more involved with healthcare in 2025. Roman said all of these are steps in the right direction.
“Improved schools are violence reduction,” she said. “Improving affordable housing and public housing is violence reduction. Trauma-informed services are violence reduction.”
Comments