<p>has anyone been attacked by the flash mob idiots near the Penn campus?</p>
<p>As far as I know, there haven’t been any incidents near Penn, although about 18 months ago there was a huge Chinese fire drill because the police and Penn administration thought there was going to be a flash mob on 40th Street one afternoon. They completely shut down the area, and nothing happened . . . basically no one showed up at all.</p>
<p>The Penn/Drexel area is included in the new expanded curfew for juveniles, along with Center City (where most of the incidents have occurred). I think that’s largely PR because move-in will be happening soon.</p>
<p>I don’t want to minimize this, or get hysterical about it. There have been 5-6 incidents this year, and maybe 3-4 much larger ones last year. That’s 8-10 too many, and some have been pretty horrific. The 2010 ones involved a lot more kids – thousands in some cases – but the recent ones have been smaller, shorter, more violent and more focused on stealing things and beating people. The City and police are in a frenzy, and rightly so. There have been a number of arrests this week. People aren’t cowering indoors or anything, though. A few weeks ago, I was actually walking through an area which got a flash mob 10 minutes later; it was a normal, busy Friday afternoon on a nice summer day, tons of people around, completely pleasant.</p>
<p>Why am I getting a bad impression of Philly so far?? hahaha.</p>
<p>It’s nothing to get too worked up about. The security at Penn is great, there are police everywhere whose job is to protect the entire area around campus, not just Penn students. While these incidents sound very scary, you have to remember that stuff like this is happening in other cities too (like Chicago). These are very hard economic times, people are hurting and unfortunately this makes it an especially bad environment for these kids. That’s why Penn tries to reach out to the surrounding community and offer jobs and opportunities to residents. It’s made University City a better place, Penn was tied for first place on a list of the “Best Neighbor Universities”.</p>
<p>I love what Mayor Nutters said about the parents who let their kids roaming on the streets.</p>