Germantown: Profile of a Previous Resident

Durrell Sloan has seen some pretty bad things happen growing up in West Philadelphia. When Sloan, 23, decided to move and get a fresh start he remembers all his friends asking why he was moving to Germantown. "They said things was bad there, asking 'sure you wanna move up there?'" Sloan said. But he figured he had seen worse, knew he needed a larger place and decided to give it a try.

Sloan, a single father of one, only lasted one and a half years. Sloan noticed the high crime rate immediately after moving into his place at Chelten and Banyton Streets. "There weren't any cops around, they showed up only if you called them," said Sloan. The final straw for Sloan was when he was walking down Germantown Avenue one day on his way to work and he spotted a man who had just been stabbed. "I didn't see him get stabbed but I saw that he had been. He was bleeding from the stab would, just sitting on the ground," Sloan reports.

The victim had been stabbed in the middle of broad daylight on a July afternoon and was slumped on the sidewalk in front of Walgreens. It seemed as if people thought he was just sitting there and it took a while for anyone to notice he was hurt, Sloan said. The victim was eventually rushed to the hospital but Sloan didn't think everything was OK. "It seemed like people just didn't care. They had this 'no hope for the future' attitude," said Sloan. The fact that the incident took place in such a public, high-traffic area and that not one person seemed to care was the scariest factor for Sloan.



The fact is the crime rate is rising, if not just in Germantown. From 1998 to 2002, the number of crimes categorized as serious in Germantown dropped but recent trends show that rate is and has been on the rise ever since. There were 17 crimes in Germantown on Nov. 1 alone according to the University of Pennsylvania's crime base and almost all of them were violent. The chart to the left shows just aggravated assaults.

For Sloan the solution was to move back to West Philadelphia and get a job in the suburbs working at a Panera Bread. He might be living in a cramped one bedroom with his daughter but he is happy knowing they will be a little safer. "You gotta watch your back, watch your neighbors' backs," said Sloan, "You just gotta give a damn about others."




Team 10: Maria Santilli and Kali Wyrosdic