During her inauguration speech, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker vowed to increase police staffing, particularly with community policing. Philadelphia Police also ramped up their recruitment and added more academy classes.
Ultimately, the city ended 2024 with 369 new hires at the academy, surpassing the department’s internal goal of hiring 350 recruits. Despite the progress, however, that number is nowhere close to filling the gap left by the hundreds of officers who retired and left the department in 2024. The city ended the year with 5,021 sworn officers, 500 fewer than when Parker came into office and 1,500 fewer officers than what the department is budgeted to have.
The Philadelphia Police Department is currently at its lowest staffing point since 1985 when it had 4.25 officers per 1,000 residents, according to FBI data. The ratio dropped below four in the late 1980s and early 1990s but rose again to four in 1995. It remained in the fours until 2021 when it dropped to 3.9 and has continued to drop since. Currently, the department has 3.2 officers per 1,000 residents.
“There’s been a real staffing problem in general since 2020,” Scott Mourtgos, a University of South Carolina professor who has studied police personnel, told NBC10.
Get top local stories in Philly delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC Philadelphia's News Headlines newsletter.
Mourtgos said there are not enough people across the nation who are interested in becoming police officers and more officers are either retiring or going to other departments.
“For the past few years, officers leave these larger cities who have hired them and trained them to go to the suburbs where they feel often more protected in the sense that they’re more supported,” Mourtgos said.
According to the Bureau of Justice, police departments in cities with one million or more residents had an average ratio of three officers per 1,000 residents. As far as determining an appropriate staffing level for a city like Philadelphia, Mourtgos said calls for service, crime levels, police training and other factors should all be considered.
Investigations
“You know, there is no magic number,” he said. “It depends on the city.”
The department’s recruitment unit has a goal of hiring 630 new officers in 2025 which is still not enough to fill the current 1500 officer vacancy.
The next Philadelphia Police recruitment drive starts Monday, Jan. 6, and will last for 30 days.
A spokesperson for Mayor Parker sent NBC10 the following statement in response to the staffing shortage.
"Mayor Cherelle L. Parker's FY2025 One Philly Budget includes funding to hire 400 Police Officers this fiscal year. Police have hired 369 officers thus far. The fiscal year runs through June 30, 2025. Although ongoing retirements present their own challenges, the Police Department has an energetic and robust recruitment campaign well underway to attract new cadets — and the administration fully supports that ongoing effort."
"Under the leadership of the Mayor and Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, we're making progress on making Philadelphia safer. Homicides declined by 34.3 percent in 2024, and the final total of 269 homicides is the lowest in a decade here. Shooting victims declined similarly by 35 percent."
"No one is resting and we have much more to do, through the Police Department and the Office of Public Safety under Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer, to make Philadelphia the safest big city in the country. But we're moving in the right direction."
