Philadelphia Police Department
The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD or Philly PD) is the police agency responsible for law enforcement and investigations within the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The PPD is one of the oldest municipal police agencies, fourth largest police force and sixth largest non-federal law enforcement agency in the United States. Since records were first kept in 1828, at least 289 PPD officers have died in the line of duty. The Philadelphia Police Department has a history of police brutality, intimidation, coercion, and disregard for constitutional rights, particularly during the tenure of Frank Rizzo as police commissioner (1967–1971) and mayor (1972–1980). The patterns of police brutality were documented in a 1978 Pulitzer Prize–winning Philadelphia Inquirer series by William K. Marimow and Jon Neuman. History Philadelphia established a night watch in 1797, and employed its first police officers to patrol the streets in daytime in 1833. The two entities were combined in 1854 to form the Philadelphia Police Department, which was modeled on London's Metropolitan Police. In 1870, a Philadelphia policeman shot and killed Henry Truman, an unarmed Black man in an alley. He was found guilty of manslaughter. In 1887, the police department was put under control of the city's Department of