Philadelphia Inquirer Features Guardian’s Work With the Philadelphia Police Department
August 16, 2026
The Philadelphia Inquirer has published an in-depth look at how the Philadelphia Police Department — one of the largest police forces in the country — transformed its officer hiring process with the Guardian platform.
As the Inquirer reports, hiring a Philadelphia police officer once took the better part of a year, with nearly four months passing before the department even made first contact with an applicant. Today, the department moves applicants from application to academy entry in roughly 54 business days, with a goal of reaching 35 — and in 2025 it trained 468 new officers, its second-highest academy enrollment of the century.
The article, by reporter Jesse Bunch, follows the department’s recruiting operation as it works through record applicant volumes, and looks at how Guardian’s screening tools — including visibility into misconduct reported by other departments and AI-assisted social media screening — help investigators move faster without lowering the bar. As Guardian founder Justin Biedinger put it to the Inquirer: “With Guardian, these applicants can’t lie.”
Guardian is proud to support the Philadelphia Police Department and the roughly 1,300 agencies nationwide that hire with confidence on the Guardian platform.