Center City is ‘remarkably safe’: New report shows that crime downtown and in other major cities isn’t on the rise

Philadelphians were riveted last week by accounts of hundreds of teenagers converging on Center City around the Fashion District, leading to breathless social media posts and TV newscasts about an increasingly dangerous and lawless downtown.

A new study from the Brookings Institution, however, finds that Center City remains one of the safest corners of town. After crunching data and conducting extensive interviews in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle, the authors did not find much evidence to ground fears about downtown crime.

“We found that across the four cities, downtowns accounted for an almost negligible share of total citywide property and violent crime,” said Hanna Love, senior research associate with the Brookings Institution and one of the study’s authors. “Center City is remarkably safe compared to the rest of the city as a whole.”

Crime remains a major issue for Philadelphia at large: The homicide rate, while lower than the past few years, remains at a pace that’s near a three-decade high. Violent crimes have long been intensely concentrated in neighborhoods beyond Center City, such as Kensington, North Philadelphia, and parts of West Philadelphia, where residents endure high levels of poverty, blight, and other systemic disadvantages.

But the narrative that shootings or violent crime haunt downtown in a way they did not before the pandemic is not true, despite some fears expressed about the blocks around the proposed 76ers arena.

Research by Love and her coauthor, Tracy Hadden Loh, originated in a project on the persistence of remote work. In interviews with 100 people across the four cities — ranging from office workers and small-business owners to corporate and government officials — they heard that the number-one barrier to returning to work in person was fear of crime in the downtown business district.

When Love and Loh crunched the numbers, however, they did not find much to support those concerns.

In Philadelphia, property crimes such as retail theft and burglaries citywide went up by 38% between 2019 and 2022, but Center City accounted for less than 1% of that spike. Violent crime increased, too — and specifically homicides are way up — but again, downtown accounted for a tiny proportion of such incidents. (Seattle was the one city studied that saw the greatest share of violent and property crime playing out downtown.)

“In Chicago and Philadelphia especially, the two more segregated cities, there was a false perception that crime from the neighborhoods was bleeding over into downtown,” Love said. “There are serious and very real fears of gun crimes, but people are often not paying attention to the data on the geography of crime.”

Across all four cities, the share of crimes committed downtown remained stable between 2019 and 2022, with the proportion of property crime committed downtown actually falling in Philadelphia during that time.

So what, then, accounts for the pervasive sense of unease?

More visible street homelessness and drug use has something to do with it, according to the study. In Philadelphia that is especially true on the SEPTA trains and in the stations that commuters use to get downtown. On public transit, some research has linked lower ridership to an increase in crime.

Although people living on the street are more likely to suffer crime than to commit it, Love said, their presence is often perceived as a sign of disorder and danger.

In many of the downtowns covered by the report, foot traffic has not returned to anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels, which can make any public drug use or antisocial activity more obvious because fewer people are around.

Relatedly, that can drive storefront vacancies, which also contribute to some passersby experiencing a feeling of danger, according to the study. All this can lead to a recursive loop in which people don’t feel safe downtown because of the empty streets, so they don’t go there, contributing to the lack of foot traffic.

But Love said that Center City Philadelphia is actually much livelier than the other cities studied in her report, due to its large residential population.

“Center City is way far ahead on [foot traffic],” Love said. “Even compared to the other cities, Center City is incredibly safe.”

But Philadelphia as a whole is suffering a gun violence crisis, with homicides soaring by 44%, according to Brookings, between 2019 and 2022. (Philadelphia’s current surge in murders is similar in intensity to the previous homicide peak in the early 1990s, whereas New York City’s homicide numbers then were five times higher than they are today.) Those crimes are almost wholly not taking place in Center City, but in systemically disadvantaged neighborhoods where much of the violence took place before the pandemic — and where it’s since become far worse.

Many of the neighborhoods suffering from spiking gun crimes are lower income and majority nonwhite, which can be seen in the results of a recent Lenfest Institute poll that found Black respondents were twice as likely as white respondents to report that gun violence is having a “major negative impact” on their lives.

But sensationalized television news coverage and ubiquitous fearmongering, context-free videos shared on social media may be driving perceptions that crime is also out of control downtown, an area full of offices, tourism, and shopping, according to the study.

“There is very increased media coverage of crime, particularly in New York City, and especially during the midterms last year,” said Love.

When combating both crime and disorder, it is important to address signifiers in the built environment such as litter, poor lighting, and ill-kept vacant lots and buildings. In Chicago and Seattle, city governments have been testing programs to encourage pop-up small businesses in vacant properties to help business districts come back.

Love says that the Center City District’s (CCD) efforts to keep downtown clean and staffed with unarmed personnel is a big help.

“If every single neighborhood had the kind of resources that Center City District has to address safety, I think Philadelphia would be much safer,” said Love. (CCD’s leader, Paul Levy, has long argued that his organization provides services downtown, so the city can concentrate on the neighborhoods.)

The Brookings Institution’s research indicates where law enforcement and other crime-fighting interventions should be targeted. Love notes that cities like New York have concentrated more police resources in tourist-heavy areas, like the subway stations around Times Square, with little effect.

“The best use of public funds would be investments in safety infrastructure in the higher-crime neighborhoods, rather than, say, adding a bunch more police officers [downtown],” she said.

The Brookings Institution’s report highlighted that business owners and residents in each city’s Chinatown reported greater safety concerns than other downtown stakeholders.

“In addition to reporting fears of theft and burglary, they also cited concerns of anti-Asian racism and hate that increased during the pandemic,” the report notes, “causing many business owners to question whether to remain within their districts.”

Love and Loh plan to issue a separate report on crime statistics and sentiments in Chinatowns.