[stayathomemom]

My daughter just moved to Philadelphia for grad school at UPenn. Her second week there she and some other people she was with witnessed a van with about 5 guys in it repeatedly try to run someone over. I guess they will have to get rid of vehicles too. She is relieved by the fact that there hasn't been a murder on her block in two years.

[libstripper]

Pennsylvania is a shall issue state. If she doesn’t already have one, she ought to get a carry permit and start packing.

[bill1952]

I lived in SE PA for 29 years and still own property in Valley Forge.

That area is - as far as I’m concerned - a cesspool.

I was visting a student there and watched a charming citizen take a dump on the sidewalk in broad daylight.

In 29 years, I always hated to go to philly.
They used to have good cheese steaks once, before they discovered cheese whiz.

[The_Reader_David]

How far off Penn campus is she living? Or was she in some other neighborhood when she saw this? When I was a grad student there in the 80’s that sort of stuff happened fairly close to campus, but after one of my successors as a math grad student was murdered about a block from my first apartment (at 40th and Pine) a decade after I finished my Ph.D., Penn redeveloped a huge swath of West Philly, and extended the reach of their own police (real police, guns and all, not like the rent-a-cops we have out here at midwestern cow colleges) into I think a 15 block arear around campus.

When I was back on sabbatical, I had the impression that the Penn neigborhood was now pretty safe. Maybe your daughter would do well to stay near Penn and only venture out into Center City and the South Street area by day. (The suburbs are fine, too: there was a movement in the 80’s for Penn grad students to live in the suburbs and commute by train. I lived in Paoli my last two years, and my best friend lived in Berwyn.)