How Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker landed on Kevin Bethel as her top cop

Secret summertime meetings in a backyard. Interviews conducted by two former police commissioners in a stately West Mount Airy home. Advice from a congressman and an out-of-state mayor.

This is the process Philadelphia Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker used to whittle down a field of more than a half-dozen candidates to land on Chief of School Safety Kevin J. Bethel as her pick for police commissioner, a hire seen as one of the most important decisions a mayor makes, and one that came before she takes office in January.

The meticulous system Parker and her transition committee developed — including soliciting advice from a bevy of advisers and asking former top policing officials to score applicants before reporting back to her — demonstrates how she’s likely to govern. She demands a clear structure and wants input from as many stakeholders as possible.

“All of the candidates, you should know, were exceptional candidates,” Parker said during a news conference last week announcing Bethel as her choice. “But at the end of this very thoughtful, careful, deliberative, and inclusive process, I strongly believe that we arrived at an exceptional candidate to lead the Philadelphia Police Department.”

Parker’s vetting of candidates began over the summer, before she won the Nov. 7 general election, when she met with contenders in her Mount Airy backyard.

During a news conference in City Hall two days after her win, Parker told the public that she’d announce her pick by Thanksgiving — two weeks away. Seven candidates’ names had already been floated in the press, including Bethel’s, and the police department’s internal rumor mill was working overtime. The clock was ticking.

» READ MORE: Cherelle Parker says she’ll hire a police commissioner with ‘knowledge of Philadelphia’

Parker onboarded interviewers whom she called “subject matter experts”: former police commissioners Charles H. Ramsey and Richard Ross. Ramsey, appointed by former Mayor Michael Nutter in 2008, was an obvious choice.

Sometimes called “the pope of policing,” Ramsey is one of the most respected law enforcement officials not only in Philadelphia, but also across the country. While his tenure coincided some of the lowest rates of gun violence in decades and his officers used at-times controversial crime-fighting tactics, he is also a reformer who, among other achievements, cochaired a task force on modern policing that was convened by former President Barack Obama.

Ross, a former top deputy to Ramsey who was appointed by Mayor Jim Kenney, does not have the same reputation. While he was seen as an effective commissioner, Ross resigned in 2019 a day after a former officer said in a lawsuit that he ignored her claim of sexual harassment by another cop because she broke off an affair with him.

Ross and other individuals were later removed as defendants, which is common in suits against the city. Last year, a jury ordered the city to pay the woman and another plaintiff $1 million in damages.

Parker said Ramsey and Ross were the best positioned to evaluate candidates.

“I was very intentional,” she said. “These two commissioners have the experience and the technical capacity, quite frankly, to cut through the BS and to help us develop the standards to measure what we call capability, competency, chemistry, and readiness.”

Together, Ross and Ramsey developed a scoring system and a consistent set of interview questions, including: What will your relationship be like with other law enforcement partners, including the district attorney and the courts? How do you think about your relationship with the police union? What is your vision for addressing the situation in Kensington?

They interviewed candidates inside a brick home in Northwest Philadelphia owned by Kimberly Turner-Dixon, chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, one of Parker’s closest political allies. Parker’s team used the house as a base to ensure privacy for the candidates and avoid press watching from outside.

Among those who interviewed were Bethel, who had spent three decades in the department and was seen as a leading contender from the jump.

» READ MORE: How Kevin Bethel’s ‘strong and direct’ persona and focus on protecting kids made him Philly’s next police commissioner

Others said to have been considered were John M. Stanford, the interim commissioner who made no secret of his desire to keep running the department; deputy commissioner Joel Dales; Joel Fitzgerald Sr., a former Philly cop 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 also started his career in Philadelphia.

Ramsey and Ross picked three finalists, including Bethel, whom they referred to Parker. The choice was in her hands.

Parker strongly values preparation, and she has said before that she needs a structured process to make major decisions. She said in a September interview: “I have watched leaders who prefer and thrive in chaos and confusion. Some people do well with that. My mind doesn’t work that way.”

She was impressed when Bethel came to his interview with not only a resume that included a post as deputy commissioner under Ramsey, but also a clear understanding of Parker’s own public safety plan.

» READ MORE: What kind of mayor does Cherelle Parker want to be?

In March 2022, months before she even announced her campaign for mayor, the then-City Council member rolled out a 17-page public safety proposal that would add “community police officers” to the force, address recruiting challenges, improve victims’ services, and fund quality-of-life programs.

During the mayoral campaign, it was rare for Parker to make it through a speech or a public forum without mentioning what she’d dubbed her “comprehensive neighborhood safety and community policing plan.”

Bethel, according to Parker, was “the most well-versed” in her vision and had developed “about a book of annotations and notes that need to be added to the plan.”

Parker sought advice from a variety of advisers, including a conversation with Baton Rouge Mayor Kimberly Weston Broome, the first Black woman to be chief executive of Louisiana’s capital city.

“She said police commissioner, while he or she must have all of the credentials and experience that is necessary to do the job, that I shouldn’t forget that chemistry is extremely important,” Parker said. “That is chemistry with the mayor and chemistry with the men and women that make up the Philadelphia Police Department.”

» READ MORE: Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker begins the transition process by vowing to fix Philly’s ‘hope deficit’

Top members of Parker’s transition committee and close confidants were intimately involved and sat in on interviews, including Evans, State Rep. Donna Bullock, State Sen. Vincent Hughes, and former Aramark CEO Joseph Neubauer.

Parker also gathered feedback from other advisers, including transition committee chair Ryan Boyer, the head of the Philadelphia Building Trades & Construction Council, and cochairs Della Clark, president of the Enterprise Center, and Greg Segall, a private equity investor. Antiviolence advocates Anton Moore, Rickey Duncan, and Chantay Love played key roles, too.

”Everybody wants this to work. The corporate community. The neighbors all across the city. The elected officials,” Hughes said. “The process that I’ve observed has been a process where all facets of the community were allowed to come to [Parker].”

As that process played out, and in the days leading up to Parker’s self-imposed Thanksgiving deadline, rumors were running rampant.

Some in the police department and the political class speculated that the city couldn’t afford Bethel, who was making a city pension and a salary from the School District of Philadelphia. Others thought maybe the job would go to Fitzgerald, who’d posted cryptically on social media about “looking forward to the changes coming to the City of Brotherly Love.” Philadelphia Magazine published a lengthy profile story about Stanford the weekend before the announcement was set to be made.

Parker waited until just days before the holiday to make a final decision. In the end, and after all that, she went with a man seen as the leading contender from the start.

Inquirer staff writers David Gambacorta, Ryan W. Briggs, and Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.