2025 Hall Fellow Adam Geer ’99 Visits CA With Focus on Justice for Communities
“The status quo can be a crippling thing,” Adam Geer ’99 said while visiting Concord Academy as the 2025 Hall Fellow. Geer serves as Philadelphia’s first chief public safety officer, charged with building trust between communities and law enforcement and coordinating efforts among city agencies to combat gun violence and dismantle open-air drug markets. He spoke from the Performing Arts Center Stage on February 28, 2025, about the challenges, and the necessity, of working collaboratively to create conditions that better serve communities.
How does a self-described “rule-follower” committed to working within the system approach systemic change? For Geer, his commitment to justice is a North Star and working relationally is indispensable. He emphasized that, although systems are notoriously slow to shift, steady engagement in community-driven solutions can improve lives.
As an example, Geer cited a coalition that introduced legislation to discontinue an inequitable reading comprehension test for Pennsylvania police officers. The previous test, required since the 1960s, asked questions about passages on topics as irrelevant as impressionist painters. “It was more difficult than the SATs,” Geer said, and it disproportionately impacted individuals without that cultural experience, particularly people of color.
In a free-flowing conversation, answering questions from Head of School Henry Fairfax and CA students, Geer also reflected on his early years. Having grown up in a small town in upstate New York, he said that as a teenager considering high schools, he “wanted to go to a place that matched my spirit … an open place that would be challenging for me, that valued inclusion, that valued community, where I could be myself.”
CA “accelerated” his personal values of inclusion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, he said. While he tried to do everything as a student, he was especially involved in music and drawn to the visual arts, learning to work in batik and clay. As a boarder, Geer found in CA “a judgment-free zone” where “you could live in your own skin.” He grew out his hair and began wearing dashikis, exploring his own style while following the example older students set of valuing individuality and encouraging self-expression.
Geer said his CA education exerted a “gravitational pull” that changed his trajectory. He saw the value of diversity. “Organizations that are more diverse, in all the ways you can think of diversity, perform better,” Geer said. “This community, because it has chosen to value diversity, will perform better. You just have more access to more ideas, to more different things. That is valuable.” And in a leadership role, he added, “you want to have differences of opinions around you, you want to have people who have different lived experience, bring something different—it just makes your product better.”
After graduating from New York University and Temple University Law School, Geer became a prosecutor. He briefly tried civil law but realized it wasn’t for him. Returning to social service, he served as assistant district attorney, prosecuting homicides, before becoming the deputy inspector general for public safety, a position created to audit and investigate policing practices to improve public trust. He began his current role directing the Office of Public Safety in January 2024. The position was developed from the conviction that “we cannot police ourselves out of violent crime” but must also put resources toward prevention and intervention.
Geer discussed the enormity of the challenge in Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by street drugs and gun violence. In the U.S., he explained, the primary mechanism for dealing with mental health crises and addiction is the criminal justice system, but public health needs to be involved. “I think we’re getting to a point as a society where we realize we can’t police mental health or substance use disorder,” he said. “The challenge is now changing the system to address that and convincing folks, often, that the resources need to be shifted.”
Geer said he cares both about treating people who are struggling in a “dignified way” and responding to the suffering of a community where children are exposed to trauma daily. Those dual concerns are driving him and partners across public service agencies to test new approaches.
“We have to try something,” he said. “We have to change the systems we can change. We have to make progress. That’s what your job is when you’re a public servant. Just throwing your hands up and saying I can’t do anything about it is not an option.”
Geer has built his career on fostering trust and finding common ground. He said what he took from CA—access to different perspectives and the ability to find something in common “even if you completely disagree with someone”—has been central to his ability to achieve short-term goals while working toward a longer-term social vision.
Asked how his perspective on work and success has evolved, Geer grew teary-eyed. He called returning to CA to speak with students as a Hall Fellow the honor of his career. “This is a pinch-me kind of a moment,” he said. “Because you don’t want to measure your success, but this to me feels like success.”
He offered students some advice: Keep an open mind. Try different things. Be clear-eyed about your talents, values, and interests and see what line of work seems a good match. Take risks.
“Some people might have told you that you can’t change the world,” Geer said. “I’m telling you that you can change the world. You will change the world. I know that you will.” He urged determination, resilience, and adaptability and emphasized the importance of working locally while keeping a wider perspective. Know that while downtimes are inevitable, he said, “the trajectory is upwards.”
During his Hall Fellow visit, Geer attended a chapel, met with students and school leaders, and enjoyed a luncheon with a few friends from his CA days. He also engaged in a U.S. History: Crime and Punishment research seminar taught by Stephanie Manzella P’14 ’17 ’18. There he spoke with juniors and seniors who were in the process of selecting research topics.
He told them why he had been drawn to prosecution. “It wasn’t because I love punishing people,” he joked. Rather, he said, he wanted to be the advocate tasked with achieving justice in the courtroom for victims of crime—and for their families and communities.
With the ease of a seasoned teacher, Geer helped Manzella’s students understand that, although the legal system is set up to be adversarial, the best prosecutors and defense attorneys work very well together, toward the same goal of ensuring a robust defense and a fair trial—meeting the criminal courts’ high standard of reasonable doubt for conviction. Working that way “reinforces the sanctity of the criminal justice system,” he said.
When a student asked if he had ever been sympathetic to someone who committed a crime in response to abuse, Geer expressed empathy while insisting, “We can’t allow vigilantism. … We want the courts to be the sole arbiter of these situations. We can acknowledge the circumstances, but we can’t take the law into our own hands.”
Geer also shared more about what Philadelphia’s Office of Public Safety has been coordinating as an alternative to the punitive approach to addiction that hadn’t worked in Kensington, which has the highest rate of violent crime in the city and the largest open-air drug market in the U.S. He explained that Pennsylvania law doesn’t allow the use of a civil tool to remove a person from the street for being under the influence of a substance, even if they appear to be a threat to themselves or someone else. “We don’t have many great tools for dealing with folks who are in the worst way,” he said.
A new pilot program is changing the terms on a local level. Established in January 2025, the Kensington Neighborhood Wellness Court downgrades drug possession from a misdemeanor to a summary offense, allowing the police to engage individuals with mental health crises or substance use disorder while minimizing consequences to encourage participation. They have the option of a same-day trial on the lesser charge—the same as for a parking ticket—or access to treatment and housing assistance. “We don’t want them going to prison,” Geer said. “We do want them getting a fair shot at access to services.”
The slow work of systems change is “like moving mountains, but there are folks who can do it and want to do it,” he said. “I’ve seen it and done it myself.”
Asked how he remains engaged and optimistic, Geer was unshakeable. “We have to,” he said. “We can’t let our systems fall apart. That would have the most impact on the very folks we want to try to protect.”
The Concord Academy Board of Trustees established the Elizabeth B. Hall Fellowship in 1963 to honor the legacy of former headmistress Betty Hall. For more than 60 years, this endowed lectureship has brought distinguished individuals to speak on campus, many of CA alums.
