Mayor Cherelle Parker taps a new top police leader to head the department’s Kensington strategy

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker announced Thursday that the Police Department has tapped a new deputy commissioner whose sole job will be to head the department’s strategy in Kensington, home to a sprawling open-air drug market that Parker has vowed to shut down.

Pedro Rosario, formerly a captain in the city’s East Division, which includes Kensington, was sworn in as the highest-ranking Latino to ever serve on the force and is the only deputy police commissioner in recent memory whose job will be focused on one neighborhood.

The promotion was the first major hire announced by new Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, who was himself sworn in just last week. While it’s common for new department heads to shake up their executive teams, Rosario’s appointment was significant in that it makes him a key leader in executing Parker’s public safety vision in Kensington.

“Kensington for a very long time has been not a priority,” said Rosario, who has spent most of his three-decade career in the neighborhood. “It’s important that now, with the leadership that we have in place, we’re moving in a direction to make it a priority.”

The announcement, one of just a handful of public appearances the mayor has made since her inauguration last week, again signaled that Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s drug overdose crisis, has factored heavily into her first moves as mayor. But Parker and Rosario stopped short of laying out a plan for the beleaguered community Thursday, saying that top officials will develop a strategy through the first 100 days of the new administration.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker declares public safety emergency

Bethel said it would “not be appropriate for us to talk about a plan when we have not yet engaged the community.”

“You want us to give you a 99-point plan of everything that you should be able see in changes. How long have we been here? Eight days? Nine days?” Parker said. “The commissioner has said today, with this appointment, they are putting the team together that will lead the efforts and implement the plan that he’s going to decide as our chief leader.”

The ceremony honoring Rosario on Thursday took place at the police station that houses the 24th and 25th police districts, which includes the neighborhoods where the drug activity in Kensington is most heavily concentrated. More than 200 people attended, including top police brass, leaders from the administration, and elected officials.

» READ MORE: Mayor Parker says she’ll do something her predecessors couldn’t: End the Kensington drug market

The event came just over a week after Bethel was sworn in during a ceremony at a middle school in the neighborhood and Parker named Kensington in the first executive order she signed. That order declared a citywide public safety emergency and directed Bethel to work with Managing Director Adam K. Thiel to develop a crime-fighting strategy within her first 100 days in office.

Bethel on Thursday sought to manage expectations, saying the neighborhood is “one of the most challenging areas in America” and is among the poorest communities on the East Coast.

“Then you add drugs, and an open drug market sits on top of it,” he said. “So we’re not going to unravel that overnight. But we are going to make progress. You are going to see demonstrated progress.”

The city’s approach in the neighborhood may come down to a matter of resources, and Bethel’s strategy is likely to inform what Parker seeks to address in Kensington through her first city budget process. Negotiations with City Council over spending are likely to begin in March.

“I’ve got to give the commissioner the opportunity to develop the plan and the strategy and present it to me, and then we bring the cabinet together and we walk through the plan,” Parker said in an interview last week.

She added: “As government comes up with what the prescription is that it can implement, the community who is there — I’m talking about on the ground from the ground up, not top down — they will be engaged.”

A handful of community leaders, school principals, and business owners attended the swearing-in ceremony, including Shannon Farrell, president of the Harrowgate Civic Association. She has worked closely with Rosario and said he “walks into meetings and restores hope.”

“There’s probably nobody who is better for this job,” she said.

Rosario said police intervention in Kensington will not be the only solution to ending the open-air drug market there. He said police will work closely with other administration officials, including from the departments that oversee public and behavioral health.

“We are diligently working to something that will empower everybody,” he said. “This is not going to be a police action only. It’s going to be an ‘us’ action. It’s going to take the entire community of Kensington, of East Division, all the officers working diligently.”

Staff writer Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.