On Thursday, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney will deliver his seventh budget address. Of all of the city's various departments, agencies and projects, one budget line is going to loom larger than any other: the cost of funding the Philadelphia Police Department.
In Philadelphia, calls to "defund the police" led to budget gymnastics last year. The Kenney administration, in an effort to avoid appearing to increase the Police Department's budget, included new police investments in the budgets of other departments. That technically kept overall direct police funding mostly unchanged last year at $729 million.
Since then, Philadelphia has recorded the worst year for homicides on record. The violence has not subsided in 2022 — nor have concerns about the excessive use of force by police. Earlier this month, police shot and killed 12-year-old Thomas "TJ" Siderio, leading Commissioner Danielle Outlaw to fire the officer who shot the child.
Meanwhile, without losing any funding, the Philadelphia Police Department's ranks — payroll costs account for about 95% of the department's budget — have been shrinking. In a hearing about police staffing in Council last week, officials testified that while the department is budgeted for 6,380 officers, it currently has approximately 5,900. That hearing, incidentally, was prompted by an Inquirer investigation that exposed police officers who abuse a Pennsylvania disability benefit for those injured in the line of duty.
In the upcoming budget season, starting with Kenney's address, there will be a lot of talk about the overall police budget. But what precisely is being funded, and how exactly the Police Department plans to spend resources, deserves just as much scrutiny.
For example: It was only in recent months that the Philadelphia Police Department has launched a unit to investigate nonfatal shootings — the type of work that one would have imagined police were already doing in a city in which 8 in 10 shootings went unsolved over the past five years.
Philadelphia also has been slow to set up alternatives to traditional police work. In May 2019, Philadelphia voters approved the establishment of an unarmed force of public safety enforcement officers to address traffic violations. Nearly three years later, these civilian officers are nowhere to be found.
And lingering in the background of any and all of these issues is the Fraternal Order of Police, which uses any tool at its disposal (including filing lawsuit after lawsuit) to block attempts at meaningful change.
Transforming policing and public safety in Philadelphia is not only a question of what happens at the budgeting level. If the city can't improve the efficacy of its recruitment efforts for the department, pouring more money into hiring additional officers will not fill vacancies. If Philadelphia can't hold police officers accountable because bad cops are rehired in secretive binding arbitration, investing in efforts to build trust among community members will come up empty.
On Thursday, Philadelphia will hear Kenney's vision for the Police Department over the next year. A month later, the Police Department will make the case for its budget request in a hearing. The question should not be only whether Philadelphia needs more or less policing — but how the Police Department, and the city, can do things differently.
