Connor Barwin's Civic Season

On Monday night, we had a big home win over our NFC East rival the New York Giants to give us a share of first place. That makes us 2-0 this season against New York teams, having beaten the Jets earlier. 

As you can tell from the civic comparison between our two cities below, Philly matches up well against the Big Apple. One of the areas we come up short in, though, is in violent crime. We have made great strides: When Commissioner Charles Ramsey announced his retirement last week, the statistics detailing our drop in crime under his reforms were noteworthy. (Murders under Ramsey, for example, dropped from 391 in 2007 to 246 in 2013, the lowest total in nearly 50 years). 

According to Prof. Richardson Dilworth of Drexel’s Center for Public Policy, there are factors more complicated than policing techniques to consider when comparing violent crime rates. “Among things most likely to increase violent crime in a city are poverty, the geographic concentration of poverty, and a higher than average proportion of men in their late teens and early twenties,” he explains. “These are not necessarily the ‘causes’ of crime per se, but measures that tend to correlate to higher crime rates. In addition, despite whatever Donald Trump might say, cities with more immigrants also tend to have lower violent crime rates. Well, New York has a lower poverty rate than Philadelphia and a higher immigrant population, both of which might explain the city’s lower violent crime rate. Both cities have about the same percentage of men in their teens and twenties, but more of those young men here are living in poverty and don’t have the same access to employment as in New York.”

Another differentiator in New York’s favor is sheer density. “New York City contains 27,000 people per square mile and Philadelphia 11,000,” says Prof. Dilworth. “Given New York’s higher level of immigrants as a percentage of the total population, people in most New York neighborhoods are likely getting more ‘exposure’ to other groups and economic classes there, and we’d expect that to lead to lower crime rates, as well.”

Next week, we take on the Carolina Panthers.

Note: We play New York teams three times this season, but only count the city once in our Civic Scorecard.