Ad Disclosure
I Can’t Prove it, but I Think the Eagles Winning a Lot of Games Helped Lower Philadelphia’s Homicide Rate
Published:
From Ellie Rushing and Jillian Kramer at the Inquirer:
For the first time in more than half a century, Philadelphia has recorded fewer than 225 homicides in a single year.
In 2025, 222 people were killed — the fewest since 1966, when there were a fraction of as many guns in circulation and 178 murders.
Great job everyone! For real. It’s always a good thing when we don’t kill each other as much.
According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s public data, the homicide rate has decreased every year since exiting the pandemic:
- 2025: 222 homicides
- 2024: 269 homicides
- 2023: 410 homicides
- 2022: 516 homicides
- 2021: 562 homicides
There were 499 homicides in 2020 itself, which was way up from the ~350 recorded in 2019 and 2018. There’s a clear pattern that shows a cresting at the height of COVID-19, followed by a gradual decline.
It seems like you have a combination of factors making a difference here. New mayor, new policies, new technology, more police arrests, etc. You combine that with things getting back to normal following COVID, after we were all cooped up in our houses at the same time the George Floyd / BLM demonstrations took place. There was a lot of frustration and anger on multiple fronts for a good 2-3 years.
It’s hard to prove definitively, but I don’t doubt that the Eagles’ Super Bowl run helped lower the homicide number. The general thought is that when the local football team is playing well, people are happy and celebrating, as opposed to angry and murdering each other. Philly Mag ran a 2013 study on this, and while they didn’t find anything conclusive in terms of violent crime, the police department confirmed that disorderly conduct arrests nearly triple after Eagles losses, compared to wins. The Inquirer also noted, last February, that crime in the 24 hours after the Super Bowl win was the lowest it had been to that point in 2025. You have your typical non-violent incidents, like vandalism in postgame celebrations, but things quiet down elsewhere in the city.
Looking a little further, the Birds played five times in the early portion of the year, going 5-0 between January 5th and February 9th en route to a title. The police data says that between January 1st and Super Bowl 59, that the year-to-date homicide rate was down 33%, while overall violent crime was down 13.87% –
Every recorded crime on this chart was down in the same time period, violent crime more than property crimes. You can see in the chart that general theft and retail theft was mostly flat, but gun robberies were way down.
Again, you can’t say definitively how much the positive zeitgeist of the Eagles moment played a role, but if crime was way down in the 24 hours following the Super Bowl, you can probably assume it was down after the NFC Championship Game, the Divisional Round win against the Rams, and the Wild Card win against the Packers. There was also the regular season finale in which Tanner McKee beat the Giants, so that’s five individual days during a five-week window in which you could justify extrapolating the post-Super Bowl data. The vibes were so good. The city was absolutely buzzing on the heels of the 2024 that Saquon and the boys put together.
The onus is on the Eagles to continue playing well, in order to keep violent crime down. The Philadelphia Police Department now in the unenviable position in of having to rely upon Kevin Patullo.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com