Only months ago, hitchBOT — an international experiment in kindness and goodwill — was obliterated in the City of Brotherly Love. The location of his remains, after an incident that garnered national attention? Old City, one of the most publicly drunk neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
Last week, the Philadelphia Police Department released Part II crime data via Open Data Philly, so we can learn the types of “small crimes” that took place between 2012 and 2014. We were particularly interested in the public drunkenness charges — there were more than 1,100 of them over two years — and where they most often took place.
Disclaimer time: These figures represent only Philadelphia Police Department citations for public drunkenness, and do not include arrests or citations made by campus police, who have jurisdiction on and around campuses like Penn and Temple.
But of the 1,183 public drunkenness calls that came in over the course of those two years, 264 of them (or about 22 percent) came from one police district in Philadelphia: The 6th district, which encompasses Old City, Chinatown and parts of both Washington Square West and Northern Liberties.
These stats make sense — the neighborhoods in the 6th district are known citywide for having some of the most hoppin’ nightlife scenes, and Old City, Chinatown and Northern Liberties have the highest number of bars in the city per capita. Old City also has the highest percentage of young people in the city, even higher than in University City and Powelton Village near Drexel.
The police district with the second highest number of incidents of public drunkenness was the 22nd district, which encompasses Brewerytown, Strawberry Mansion and some areas surrounding Temple University. Over the two year period, 164 incidents of public drunkenness (or about 14 percent of all incidents) occurred in this district.
A let’s not forget to give a round of applause to our well-behaved friends in other neighborhoods. Two police districts in the city didn’t record one public drunkenness incident over the course of two years. They were the 7th district, located in the far northeast, and the 19th district, which encompasses Overbrook in West Philly.
Below you can explore every police district in Philadelphia and see the number of public drunkenness incidents that occurred there over the two year period. Darker shades of green indicate higher numbers of incidents of public drunkenness.
