Keeping Up Appearances: Profiting from Patriarchy in the Nation's 'Safest' City

Alec Brownlow, DePaul University

Abstract

This paper explores the history and the political and economic dividends of manipulating urban crime data. It demonstrates data manipulation as an historic and widely practiced method of safety construction in cities and discusses why rape is a crime especially prone to statistical corruption. Insofar as hiding rape makes a city appear to be safer than it actually is, I argue that the practice has taken on greater political and economic significance in this era of mobile capital and interurban competition. I explore these themes in a case study from Philadelphia and I discuss the many contradictions that it points to. Patriarchy, I conclude, is a tool of economic development that puts all urban women at risk.