Homicides in Philadelphia drop to lowest level in 60 years

Philadelphia is on track to record its lowest number of annual homicides in six decades, as well as declines in shootings, assaults, retail thefts and most other serious crimes compared to last year.

The Philadelphia Police Department reports there were 220 homicides in 2025 as of Tuesday night, fewer than the most recent low of 246 in 2013. The count hasn’t been so low since 1966, when there were 178 homicides.

The figures extend a local and national trend of declining crime since the pandemic-era peak in 2021, when 562 people were killed in Philadelphia.

District Attorney Larry Krasner attributed the continued drop to several factors, including the work of his office’s gun violence task force, which focuses on arresting shooting suspects and reducing the number of illegal firearms on the streets. The task force works with the state attorney general, the PPD and federal law enforcement agencies, he said.

The DA’s office shares its forensic and investigative resources “all the time with PPD, all the time with FBI, ATF, DEA. We crack phones, we look at cameras,” he said at a press conference Wednesday. “We have social media analysts, just as the Philadelphia Police Department does. We work closely, and this is how you get it done.”

Krasner at the same time acknowledged the ongoing toll of gun violence in the city and the pain suffered by the hundreds of families who still lose loved ones every year.

“There is nothing to celebrate about 220 people losing their lives to homicide, others suffering terrible losses from shootings, from sexual assaults and from other heinous crimes,” he said. “There’s nothing to celebrate there, but certainly we’re happy at how many people have not been victimized.”

Progress despite poverty and firearms

Krasner highlighted the drops in several categories of crime compared to 2024. Gun robberies are down 22% for the year, aggravated assaults with a gun fell 14%, home burglaries 11% and retail theft 12%, according to PPD data.

Shooting incidents decreased 29% from last year, to 826 shootings, and the number of shooting victims recorded fell by 16%, to 906 people.

A notable exception to the downward trend was rape, which rose 8% compared to 2024. Thefts from people (as opposed to thefts from autos) jumped 22%, which Krasner attributed to a rise in “scams.”

Philadelphia City Councilmember Curtis Jones said a collaborative focus among elected officials and agency heads on stopping gun violence has played a key role in improving safety.

“In the last administration to now, people are in rooms pointing at problems, trying to point at solutions, as opposed to pointing at each other, blaming them,” Jones said. “I see the difference.”

Krasner noted that crime overall has continued falling despite Philadelphia’s status as one of the poorest big cities in the country, and what he described as “terrible” permissive state gun laws, compared to New York and New Jersey.

“How is that happening when we are dragging this enormous bag of sand of poverty, and this enormous bag of sand of access to guns?” he asked.

In addition to law enforcement efforts, the answer lies with the network of volunteers and community groups that do violence-interruption work on the streets and provide supportive programs for young people, he said. Those include many funded by anti-violence grants from his office and the city.

“It’s because of good coaches, it’s because of good clergy, it’s because of good neighbors. It’s because of good mentors,” he said. “It is because of good community-based organizations, and it is because of people in government who actually invest in human beings and who believe that if you meet the basic needs of young people, that they will go in a direction that is not shooting each other.”

Urging caution on New Year’s Eve

Krasner and the other officials who spoke at the district attorney’s offices on Wednesday morning urged residents to support the trend of decreasing violence by not engaging in dangerous behaviors on New Year’s Eve, particularly celebratory gunfire and drunk driving.

“Don’t shoot guns up in the air. Just don’t. They come down and somebody can get hurt, innocent people, children, and maybe your loved one,” Sheriff Rochelle Bilal said. “I’m pleading that, let’s make this end of the year, going into a new year, a year where nobody shoots a gun up in the air, and then we won’t have to have this press conference about telling you not to do it.”

“It is, at best, a nuisance. It is, at worse, a murder,” Jones said. “You do not want to be the last person to commit a homicide in 2025 and you don’t want to have that on the death register in 2026.”

Police will be arresting people who fire weapons, and looking for people who are driving while intoxicated, said Chief Inspector Winton Singletary, who works in special events planning for the police department.

“If you’re out partying, remember, look out for a friend. Drinking and driving, it’s just as bad as a gunshot. If you’re driving down the street, we are going to have enforcement out here, out on the streets for DUIs and impaired driving,” he said.

In response to a question about terrorism, Singletary said the police are aware that such attacks are always a possibility and are working to prevent them, both at this week’s new year festivities and through the World Cup games and other events happening in Philly next year.

“We don’t have any intel that we have anything, a direct hit for us or anything else. But these people look for any kind of big venues to make a mess of and what have you,” he said. “We are prepared, and as of right now, we don’t see anything coming our way.”