Crime on SEPTA fell again last year — to historic lows

Incidents of serious crime on SEPTA fell again last year, reaching their lowest levels in at least a decade.

SEPTA police reported 670 serious crimes across the system in 2025, about 6% fewer than the previous year. Those were mainly thefts, robberies and aggravated assaults, and also included two homicides and one rape.

That compares to 1,063 crimes in 2023, when there were six homicides. Overall incidents peaked at 1,236 in 2020, during the chaos of the pandemic.

The continued decrease in crime in the transit agency’s stations and on its buses, trains and trolleys reflects a broader societal trend. In 2025, Philadelphia had its fewest homicides in nearly 60 years as crime fell across the U.S.

But the big drop in incidents over the past two years also shows the impact of the agency’s ramped-up hiring of police officers, their greater visibility in stations, and a crackdown on fare evasion and other minor offenses, SEPTA Deputy Chief James Zuggi said. 

“If you’re committing a crime to enter our system, at that point you feel like you can do pretty much whatever. When we’re introducing police officers at the gate and we’re letting people know what’s expected, we believe they’re less likely to commit crime once they get on the system,” he said.

The authority has kept hiring cops despite a lengthy budget impasse that led to a major fare hike and a plan to deeply cut services. The crisis was temporarily resolved in September, when Gov. Josh Shapiro allowed SEPTA to shift $394 million in capital funds to its operating budget, giving the agency two more years to find a permanent solution.

“While 2025 was one of the most challenging years in SEPTA’s history, we stayed focused on delivering improvements to the system, especially when it comes to safety,” General Manager Scott Sauer said. 

Blocking fare evaders

SEPTA’s police department has grown to about 258 sworn officers, including 17 currently in training. That’s up from 210 during the pandemic.

Those numbers have allowed the department to increase its presence in busier locations and improve the officers’ deterrent effect, Zuggi said.

“When you’re coming through and you’re a normal commuter, you like seeing a police officer because you feel safe. The person who’s coming through who intends to commit a crime sees a police officer and might say, ‘I’m not committing a crime because there are cops all over the place,’ ” he said. “So we want to take advantage of that and put police officers where they’ll be seen by the most amount of people.”

Over the last year, the authority has focused on fare evasion, both to discourage misconduct generally and improve its finances, Zuggi said. Unpaid fares reportedly cost SEPTA some $50 million annually in lost revenue, something it can ill afford given a structural budget deficit that amounts to $213 million a year.

To make it harder to get on the system without paying, the authority has been installing full-height fare gates at 14 stations. It expects to have 200 installed by this summer. They don’t stop all fare evaders, but SEPTA says the gates reduce their numbers and provide data on where evasion is happening.

Every other week, police pick a different hotspot where officers go and perform “sustained” enforcement, Zuggi said. 

“If I look at the data, and I see that that location is seeing its most fare evasion between 2 and 4 in the afternoon, that’s when I’m going to deploy police officers there,” he said. “That’s something we couldn’t do before with the normal gates.”

Last year the department wrote out 8,412 criminal citations for fare evasion, a 48% increase from the year before, he said.

Restoring social norms

The sharp drop in serious crimes has allowed SEPTA police to focus more on “quality-of-ride” issues like smoking and disorderly conduct that draw complaints from commuters and depress ridership, Zuggi said.   

However, challenges remain, like fare evasion and other misconduct on buses. A series of attacks on bus operators led police to advise them not to “get into a back-and-forth” with people who get on a bus without paying, he said. 

SEPTA has been testing bullet-resistant glass enclosures to protect drivers, and last year established a police unit dedicated just to enforcement on buses, which helped reduce crime on the vehicles by 17%, Zuggi said.  

The authority also launched a “Smoke-Free SEPTA” campaign in 2024 with new signage, announcements on platforms and in vehicles, and an increased police presence, and encouraged riders to report people smoking via text or the Transit Watch app. 

In the last three months of 2025, app users submitted 1,009 reports of smoking, along with 1,313 of homeless people, 748 of drug or alcohol use, 344 of fare evasion, 417 of disruptive behavior and 176 of cleanliness issues, according to a police report. 

In the rare instances where officers see someone smoking on the system, they can issue a ticket. But it will take more than just enforcement to restore the social norms against bad behavior on public transit, Zuggi said. 

“Some of it, unfortunately, lies within the individual. They just decide that they’re going to be that ignorant to light up a cigarette or light up marijuana on the train with other people,” he said. “The citizens kind of lost their mind during the pandemic, and we have to get that cultural change back, where people consider other people when they’re on the system.”

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