Which Philly neighborhoods are seeing more crime
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Philadelphia homicides hit a historic low last year, but nonviolent crimes increased in some neighborhoods, per a new Pew report.
The big picture: The city's violent and nonviolent crimes are concentrated in different places, suggesting different neighborhoods require different public safety strategies.
State of play: Violent crime is more common in residential areas with more vacant lots and buildings, while nonviolent crime tends to cluster around commercial corridors and major transit hubs.
- Neighborhoods including Rittenhouse Square, Germantown, Harrowgate and Kensington had higher crime rates per capita than many other parts of the city, researchers found.
Zoom in: Point Breeze and Spring Garden — two historic neighborhoods — illustrate how crime trends can diverge sharply.
- Rising thefts in Spring Garden — one of the city's wealthier neighborhoods north of Center City, where home prices often go for more than $500,000 — helped drive a 20% increase in reported crime between 2019 and 2025, per the report.
- Meanwhile, Point Breeze — a historically working-class South Philly neighborhood where home prices have more than doubled over the past decade — saw reported crime fall 21% over the same period.
Zoom out: Over the same five-year period, Philadelphia had about 13% fewer police officers on the force, Pew notes.
- And police have recently changed the way they deploy officers, with Commissioner Kevin Bethel focusing on a pinpoint strategy that targets the city's most violent neighborhoods while consolidating resources elsewhere.
Catch up quick: Police merged the 6th and 9th police districts in 2024, impacting parts of Spring Garden.
- While the neighborhood didn't have a single homicide last year, 63% of its reported crimes were theft-related, per the report.
- Point Breeze also struggled with theft, which increased about 9% between 2019 and 2025 and accounted for nearly 20% of reported crimes last year.
Caveat: Areas with more surveillance can generate more reported crimes, Pew says.
What they're saying: Pew hopes the report will improve future policing strategies, showing officials through data what interventions are needed by neighborhood, Pew's research and policy initiative officer Mari Gonzalez tells Axios.
- "Areas that you may think that are more safe may be areas that are attracting crime," she says. "So if they exist within a neighborhood or ZIP code, then that is a way that you can apply resources there instead of trying to apply solutions across the city."