Philadelphia Police to Stop Some Kid Arrests under New Diversion Plan

Starting on Monday, Philadelphia police will stop arresting kids who are accused of first-time, low-level offenses, and instead will send them to a police diversion program that aims to address misbehavior without drawing youth into the juvenile justice system.

The offenses — including disorderly conduct, shoplifting, vandalism, and assaults without significant injuries, plus some more serious charges involving children under 13 — are ones that almost certainly would have been funneled into diversion programs later in the court process.

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said his hope is to spare children the trauma of being arrested, handcuffed, and booked, while creating alternative mechanisms to address the root causes of their behaviors. Youth who are arrested, he said, will still be processed through central intake at Philadelphia's Juvenile Assessment Center, known as the JAC, a facility he previously had said would close.

He views it as a natural follow-up to the diversion program he launched a decade ago as the safety chief for the School District of Philadelphia, which once saw more than 1,500 student arrests a year.

"One of the things I learned in the school diversion program is that I have the power, policing has the power, to make a different decision," he said.

Back then, Bethel had been startled to learn that three-quarters of students arrested in schools ended up in diversion programs.

"Why didn't anyone tell me?" he recalled thinking. "We could have avoided putting a 10-year-old child in a cellblock for six hours because she came to school with Mace that her mother gave her to protect herself."

That diversion program cut in-school arrests by more than 90%, referring many youth instead to Intensive Prevention Services, a series of after-school programs funded by the city Department of Human Services.

The Philadelphia police youth diversion program is similar in some ways, but it will start small, with fewer than a dozen trained youth officer specialists, and with a relatively narrow set of qualifying charges.

Those charges are separated into three tiers:

When police stop kids for the lowest-level offenses, such as disorderly conduct or public drunkenness, officers will be instructed to release them immediately but refer them to a mandatory one-day restorative program.
More serious offenses — trespassing, vandalism, or thefts (excluding stolen cars) — will trigger that same referral, but officers will also drive teens home or to one of the city's Evening Reporting Centers for additional services.
The most serious eligible cases involve kids ages 10 to 12 who are arrested for car theft, arson, burglary, or drug possession, or those ages 10 to 17 who are charged with simple assault.

They will be arrested and brought to the JAC. From there, a dedicated youth officer specialist will refer the youth to Intensive Prevention Services and conduct follow-up home visits, Bethel said. He thinks officers may uncover issues, such as food insecurity, that they can help find resources to address.

"A 10-year-old child in a stolen car — there's a problem, right? And in lieu of just trying to move that child into the criminal justice system, we want to take an opportunity to see if we can get to the root issue."

Bethel had previously said shuttering the JAC was necessary to free up staff for his citywide diversion plan.

That alarmed defense lawyers and youth advocates who had fought for years to open the center in late 2023 as an alternative to processing minors through ordinary police booking facilities, where kids were frequently detained for lengthy stretches in violation of state law.

The program rolls out at a moment when many police leaders and politicians elsewhere are moving in the opposite direction, calling for tougher responses to youth crime.

Serious crime by minors and adults alike has declined in the last decade in Pennsylvania, though a post-pandemic spike in gun violence by and against children has left many with a sense of spiraling crime rates.

A shift in culture

Mayors in New Jersey, police brass in New York City, and prosecutors in Maryland have pushed for harsher penalties or for the prosecution of younger children, citing recent incidents of gun violence by teens.

Bethel said that the egregious incidents making headlines represent a "very, very small percentage" of cases.

The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office already diverts about 20% of juvenile cases and reports rearrest rates that are far lower than for the juvenile justice system overall.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said moving cases through that process more quickly, without processing kids in police lockups, makes sense.

"This is about having a Philadelphia that is safer and that is freer, and an absolute key to that has to be in our efforts to rehabilitate juveniles when they get into trouble," he said. But, he said, it's too soon to say how his office might adapt its own diversion programs as low-level cases are removed from the system.

Defense lawyers and youth advocates also welcomed Bethel's push to keep kids out of the system but said police-led diversion would require a significant cultural shift, particularly if officers are to be welcomed into people's homes.

"They don't have a good history dealing with young people and Black people in general," said Reuben Jones, whose organization, Frontline Dads, works with justice-involved youth.

Nicole El, chief of the children and youth justice unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said past efforts at police diversion resulted in racial and geographic disparities.

"How is it going to work logistically?" she said. "We see a lot of overcharging, so I'm concerned about giving officers a lot of discretion to look at a case and decide, 'Is this a simple assault or an aggravated assault?'"

In Jones' view, to make a real impact, diversion programs need to expand.

"The cars and the gun charges are the two areas the kids need the most help with," Jones said.

In 2024, minors in Pennsylvania accounted for 12% of arrests for serious crimes reported to the state's Uniform Crime Reporting System — but half of arrests for car thefts.

The District Attorney's Office has directed dozens of kids accused of car theft to diversion programs, but others are sentenced to state institutions.

Bethel said the program and the list of eligible charges will evolve.

The culture shift is a work in progress.

He said he passes out index cards during trainings, telling officers to write down something they'd gotten away with as teens that they could have been arrested for.

"Invariably, they write something down," he said. "We've all done some stupid adolescent things."

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