On September 27, 2018, Mayor Kenney issued an urgent “Call to Action” mandating that his cabinet and senior leadership develop within 100 days a plan for how to dramatically reduce the killings and shootings in Philadelphia.

In response to this call to action, a comprehensive plan was created establishing a strategy for gun violence prevention and to reduce the rising gun violence rates, entitled The Philadelphia Roadmap to Safer Communities. This plan takes a public health approach to violence that uses science and data to better understand the problem. This approach also allows us to develop strategies to address the underlying factors that contribute to the violence in our communities, not the least of which is pervasive poverty.

On April 14, 2021, the City of Philadelphia released its 2021 Update to the Philadelphia Roadmap to Safer Communities 5-year gun violence reduction plan. The Spring 2021 update to the Roadmap was informed by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, activism following the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police, rising gun violence in Philadelphia and across the country, and our nation’s reckoning with decades of systemic racism.