Is Pottstown less safe than other towns?
- pottstownmercury
- Mar 9, 2015
- 5 min read
Poverty, jobs, revitalization play a part in crime rates
By Evan Brandt
How many times have you heard it in the past year?
“Pottstown is turning into another Reading.”
It’s the kind of comparison not meant to reflect well on the Berks County seat, labeled in 2011 as the nation’s poorest city.
But comparisons are a way to put things in context.
To get a better understanding of crime’s effect on Pottstown, The Mercury compared Pottstown’s 2014 crime rate to its 10-year average and its 2012 crime rate — the latest year for which complete data was available — with crime rates in other places.
The data showing Pottstown’s crime rates were far higher in 2012 than Pennsylvania and the United States as a whole — and even higher than U.S. cities with similar-sized populations brought objections from Pottstown Police Captain Robert Thomas.
“You can’t compare Pottstown with places like East Coventry,” he said.
East Coventry is a largely homogeneous semi-rural community with a high median income, and Pottstown is an ethnically diverse urban center, with a below average median income, and that demographic makes a difference.
In a comparison of Pottstown’s crime rate in 2012 with other similar urban areas — Coatesville and Phoenixville in Chester County, Norristown in Montgomery County and Reading in Berks — Pottstown was neither the worst nor the best.
Pottstown topped out in three of the major crime categories, having the highest rape, larceny and arson rates that year.
It tied with Reading, which had the highest assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft rates in 2012, while Coatesville had the highest murder rate and Norristown had the highest robbery rate in 2012.
Factors that affect crime
Coatesville’s high murder rate in 2012 can create a false impression, said Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan.
“Well, 2012 was an interesting year,” Hogan told The Mercury.
“It was the first year I was in office and we inherited a huge mess in Coatesville,” he said. The police department was understaffed, they had no chief and the drug trade had gone unchecked for four years.”
“What we mostly had was Philadelphia drug dealers setting up shop, and then mixing it up with local drug dealers,” Hogan said of the source of Coatesville’s violence, which saw six murders in one year.
He said aggressive enforcement of drug laws by police and county authorities got things back under control “and there has not been a homicide in Coatesville since then.”
Similarly, Berks County District Attorney John Adams said major crime is lower now in Reading than it was in 2012.
“We’ve had a reduction in shootings and homicides,” Adams said. “We’ve dropped a lot in the past couple of years and I attribute that to my detective unit, which has been very active in enforcing the drug laws.”
Adams said “we have taken down a number of large-scale drug dealers in the city over the past couple of years. We’ve been able to get a lot of violent offenders off the street.”
Factors that affect perception
In all three counties, many of the factors are the same in any given year.
“Most of these communities are great communities, which are mostly filled with good, law-abiding people who are being chased indoors by a minute percentage of the population who are violent offenders,” said Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman.
“They are often young, involved in the drug trade and have very little respect for life,” Ferman said, of the criminal element. “Generally, what we are seeing is rival drug dealers shooting each other, and it’s going on in Philadelphia, in Norristown and in Pottstown, but it is always our fear that an innocent bystander is going to get caught in the crossfire.”
And that is the fear underlying much of the increased concern about crime now being seen in Pottstown.
“They are a very small number of individuals and, when law enforcement targets them, it has a larger impact on the quality of life,” she said.
Crime, and the perception of crime, are huge factors in a community’s quality of life.
“If people think it’s bad, perception becomes reality,” said Ferman.
“When you are dealing with towns like Pottstown and Norristown, you have a much higher poverty level, which means more kids at risk, and all the societal things that go along with that. Urban communities have a different set of challenges,” she said.
“Crime is certainly greater in these two municipalities, but they are not outliers, or any different from similar urban municipalities in other places,” said Ferman.
Changing income level changes crime
There is one outlier among the municipalities examined.
With one exception — larcenies — Phoenixville’s crime rates ranked lowest of all the boroughs compared, even though its population is a little bigger than Coatesville’s.
Hogan has a pretty simple explanation.
“The real reason, the underlying reason for the difference, is that Phoenixville has been revitalized,” he said. “The median income and median educational level across Phoenixville has risen dramatically, as have property values.”
“There really is no comparison between Phoenixville now compared to the Phoenixville of ten years ago,” said Hogan. “They used to be comparable, Phoenixville and Coatesville, old steel towns that were burned out.
“But now,” Hogan said, “Phoenixville is a bustling center of affluent Chester County and Coatesville is still a burned-out steel town.”
“The simple answer is there are a variety of social and economic patterns at work in the two places,” he said.
“Poverty is absolutely a contributing factor in crime,” said Adams.
“It’s a factor in the sense that people are looking for an easier way to make a dime, so they turn to the drug trade,” Adams said. “The trade leads them to getting involved in other crimes.”
Adams said “we have a huge transient population and many of our young people are not getting the education they should receive. A lot of them are dropping out and, at that point, where do they turn? A lot of them are turning to crime.”
He added, “it’s a shame they don’t stay in school and complete their education because then they miss out on opportunities for employment, and there are plenty of opportunities out there.”
Phoenixville turned around
Phoenixville’s opportunity for revitalization began about the time Sly Fox Brewery came into town, said Hogan. “They were an anchor, and others followed.”
Sheila Dugan, the executive director of the Pottstown Downtown Improvement District Authority, believes that economy is a big factor in turning the town around.
During a Feb. 16 citizen meeting about crime, she said she worries about a concentration of social services in Pottstown that is not accompanied by a high employment rate.
“So someone gets a grant to help house the homeless, which is great, but we don’t have the jobs for them, so they go back to what they know,” she said.
Efforts to revitalize Pottstown’s economy must coincide with efforts to stamp out the drug trade and the violent crime that comes with it, Dugan said.
Ferman agrees.
“Focusing on the drug trade and the violence that is attendant to the drug trade has the ultimate result of improving quality of life and, more importantly, stemming violence,” she said.
Pottstown resident Lou Augustine said more effort is needed to stem that tide.
“I was walking my dog in Memorial Park a while back and I saw an old woman out walking her dogs,” he said.
“The dogs started sniffing each other and we started talking and she told me I had better be careful walking my dog in the park. She said she had learned her lesson and she showed me she had a gun in her waistband,” he said.
“It’s so sad that a little old lady had to arm herself just to walk her dog,” said Augustine.
“You know what I would like for Pottstown?” Augustine asked. “I would like on a nice spring day to walk down my street and see my neighbors sitting on their front porches like they used to do, instead of hiding inside their houses.”
