<p>I also heard it is no worse than Boston, NYC, and DC? Honestly how bad can it be? This is a huge factor of if I should apply to Penn. Of course I will visit Penn sometime to see whether I like it or not, but I wanted opinions from you guys?</p>
<p>Yes and no. If you are smart and use common sense, NO. If you don’t have common sense, potentially YES.</p>
<p>The same applies to every other city you mention. </p>
<p>Bottomline, you don’t want to wander too far off campus into West Philly, alone, late at night, tipsy, with money hanging out your pocket. Be smart. Wherever you are.</p>
<p>I agree with the post above. In any city you must use common sense, but the West Philly area is relatively safe. The area around Penn is especially so since there are DPS people on every corner. I think the patrol area extends to somewhere between 42nd and 45th. I myself live on 40th street and always feel safe walking home since there are so many people (including DPS) around.</p>
<p>Not only do you have many DPS, you also have philly police and Drexel security in the area. I’ve seen all three around the Sheraton during my 1/2 dozen visits since August.</p>
<p>To follow up on what others have said:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.publicsafety.upenn.edu/UPPD/”>http://www.publicsafety.upenn.edu/UPPD/</a></p>
<p>And again, this is in addition to the Philadelphia and Drexel police departments.</p>
<p>My wife and I lived in the Penn area, but outside the Penn patrol zone, for more than a decade, at the height of the crack epidemic and a low point for the area. The crime statistics were much worse than they are now. It was fine. Nothing bad happened. We walked around late at night, alone and together; we took public transportation. We rarely, if ever, felt unsafe. The statistics for “West Philadelphia” cover a huge area that Penn students will never see (and where, frankly, no one ever sees a Penn student).</p>
<p>Every single college campus, including fabulously wealthy ones in fabulously wealthy suburbs, like Princeton, or in the middle of nowhere, like Williams or Dartmouth, has petty crime problems. If you don’t pay attention, your stuff will get stolen. That’s true at Penn, too. The real danger college students face, everywhere, is from other college students. Where do you think you will actually be safer: a place where someone gets mugged (but not hurt) every so often but hardly anyone drives when they go out at night, or a place where social life revolves around driving to places where people can drink? A place where there are a thousand things to do, or a place where the main thing to do is getting drunk?</p>
<p>And remember, Penn isn’t just a college – it’s a small city worth of undergraduates, grad students, professors, administrators, researchers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, medical techs, orderlies, janitors, construction workers, shopkeepers, street vendors . . . . There are probably something like 40,000 people on the Penn campus every day, and another 20,000 or so next door at Drexel. When you have that many people, you have a certain level of crime; it’s unavoidable. But that doesn’t mean that every one of those 60,000 people experiences crime. Far from it. If there are 100 crimes a month – and there aren’t – in the course of a year that would affect 2% of the population.</p>
<p>Like most urban universities – like Columbia, USC, Chicago, Hopkins, Brown, MIT, Harvard, Tufts, NYU, Fordham, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Rice . . . – Penn is not that far away from areas where poor, non-white people live. And since it’s a big area, not a gated community (unlike, say, Columbia or Fordham), Penn students see poor, non-white people walking around on the same streets they use. If that freaks you out – and it does freak some people out at first, although only a few of them can’t learn to de-freak within a few weeks of coming to Penn – then you may not feel comfortable at Penn. But objectively, you will never be unsafe.</p>
<p>If you are uncomfortable with the thought of seeing non-white people, go someplace else and forego Penn’s world-class education.</p>
<p>I spent a lot of time walking around Penn and the surrounding area, and I felt very safe the entire time. It is really a beautiful campus and the crime rate is one of the lowest for ivy league campuses. </p>
<p>If you were to walk alone at 3am and you walked several blocks to the west of the campus, you would be less safe, so a small degree of common sense may be required. Students can call to have campus police pick them up and escort them if they are somewhere and feel unsafe, but none of the current students that I talked with had ever used it. However, they do like knowing that it is available.</p>