PHILADELPHIA >> When Nature designed Kevin Bethel, it had a police commissioner in mind. Physically, he fills his uniform with embodied authority. Temperamentally, he is phlegmatic, a virtue welcome in his office in this city. Five decades ago, the commissioner was a problem.

Bethel, 61, rose from Philadelphia’s Black community to become, in 2024, the top cop in the nation’s seventh-largest city. This was nearly 60 years after Frank Rizzo — a 6-foot-2-inch, 240-pound high school dropout and self-described “toughest cop in America” — was rising toward the police commissioner’s office, then two terms in the mayor’s office.

The 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles presaged urban unrest nationally, and a Philadelphia majority embraced Rizzo, who promised, “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a f—-t.” After alerting the media to a 1970 raid on the Black Panther Party, his police strip-searched party members. The front page of the next morning’s Philadelphia Daily News featured a photo of a naked Black man. One evening, hearing of a riot, Commissioner Rizzo left a black-tie dinner, tucking a nightstick into his cummerbund and saying “my men, my army” were going to work.

“The department was very brutal,” Bethel says. The police ethos was “take no prisoners, ask no questions. You’re the biggest gang in the city; have at it.” The Great Migration of southern African Americans to northern cities came late to Philadelphia, as did police professionalization.

Today, Bethel’s force is armed with computer guides to crime hotspots and drones that can be over a crime scene in two minutes. No aspect of American governance — not housing, not health care, not welfare, certainly not K-12 education — has achieved successes as dramatic as policing has.

The benefits have accrued disproportionately to communities with average incomes below the national median, below the national average of intact families (two parents in the home), above-average unemployment, and below-average years of schooling. Because crime is often minorities preying on minorities, if you ask what residents in those communities want regarding policing, the answer often will be: more. Hence the injustice, as well as the political lunacy, of the “Defund the police” clamor that boomeranged on the left from which it emanated.

Police have often felt as though they are bailing oceans with thimbles. Forty-three years ago, however, they got some assistance from academia. In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published in the Atlantic their essay on “broken windows” and crime.

Broken windows, if not repaired, will, they said, proliferate. Abandoned cars, litter-strewn vacant lots, public urination: Quality-of-life offenses produce a menacing sense of spreading disorder. This atomizes communities, dissolving the glue of mutual regard and obligations of civility. People stay indoors, surrendering public spaces to marauders. The urban doom loop accelerates.

Sophisticated scientific research has confirmed what grandma knew (about exercise, rest and nutrition). Wilson and Kelling confirmed what did not look like common sense until they articulated it concerning the social incubation of crime. Bethel says “broken windows policing” works only if employed by officers who practice the subtle craft of police work: by not making their attention to obnoxious behaviors obnoxious.

“Overpolicing” — “going after everything” — can, Bethel warns, “boil the city.” The key to what he calls “resetting norms” is the elusive, crucial ingredient in all of life: judgment.

It is, Bethel says with intense terseness, “not normal” for children leaving school to see “someone sticking a needle in his arm” or for people to come out on their porch “and see someone defecating on their lawn.” He means such things should not be normal. It is, however, normal in the Kensington neighborhood, with its notorious open-air drug market.

The invention of automobiles gave criminals mobility, and the interstate highway system has exacerbated Bethel’s problems: I-95, a north-south drug trafficking corridor, passes not far from Kensington, bringing customers and product to what has been called “the Walmart of heroin.” And of even worse drugs, such as xylazine, a horse tranquilizer that produces necrotizing wounds: flesh-eating bacterial infections. (See Charles Fain Lehman in the Manhattan Institute’s winter 2025 City Journal.)

Bethel is authorized to have 1,200 more officers than the 6,300 he has to police 142 square miles. Recruiting people to cope with Kensington is a challenge.

In the mid-1890s, the well-publicized midnight rambles of New York’s 36-year-old police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, fueled his political ascent. Frank Rizzo, too, used publicity to propel himself into politics. Bethel, knowing that crime cannot be eliminated, only contained, likes the job he has. There it is: judgment.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.