Yvonne Haskins died at home in Germantown on September 29, 2026, at 88, after a working life in which she was the first woman to hold four separate jobs in Philadelphia policing, parole and campus security, and then went back to school and became a lawyer.
She was a real estate attorney who ran her own firm in Philadelphia and Camden, and she came to the law late and from an unlikely direction. Born in Atlanta in 1938, she finished high school at 15 and entered Spelman College at 16. She moved to Philadelphia with two young sons in 1962 and joined the Philadelphia Police Department in 1965, staying four years and taking in brutality complaints in a department that had almost no women in it.
From there the firsts came one after another. She was the first woman to head security at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1973. She was the first woman to serve as a regional director at what is now the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. From 1977 to 1987 she was the first woman to run the Philadelphia district of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, directing a $4 million budget and a staff of 175.
Then she started over. She entered Temple University’s law evening school in 1982, at 44, and finished the degree in 1986, at 48. Ten years later she served 90 days as interim city attorney for Camden.
Her last decades went to her own neighbourhood. She was executive director of West Mount Airy Neighbors, helped found the Germantown United Community Development Corp., and in 2015 helped organise Friends to Save the Germantown YWCA, which gathered hundreds of petition signatures. She worried in public about who would end up owning Germantown’s vacant properties.
“Sooner or later, human beings figure things out,” she said in 2011.
Her daughter, Kristin Haskins Simms, put it plainly. “She didn’t believe in retirement.”
A service is set for 11 a.m. on Saturday, November 7, at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown.
