@OldCheermomDC I am really glad you and your child liked Temple and its campus. Temple is a great option for a lot of students, and it has some first-rate students and faculty. The university is doing a great job of improving itself in every respect, including its attractiveness to students and its safety.
That said . . . I am fairly familiar with most of the campuses you mention. (I have never been to, or anywhere near, Purdue or Lafayette IN. I have never seen the University of Miami, but I know a bunch of families whose kids have gone there, and I think I know something about the community in which it is located.) I think you are wrong. With the reservation noted above, it is difficult to imagine the specific kind of incident that occurred at Temple a few weeks ago occurring at any of them.
All of them have some level of crime, especially the large universities – that’s unavoidable. Students can and do get mugged at any of them, and at practically every other comparable institution that is not in the middle of nowhere. And of course, the institutions that ARE in the middle of nowhere have their own extensive list of safety concerns, some of which are more serious than anything that would apply at Temple or other urban schools. But a Friday night flash-mob parade of hundreds of non-student youths trying to demonstrate their control over central parts of the campus and immediately adjacent areas? I don’t think so.
That’s not to say that Temple is necessarily less safe or “worse” than any of the others. It just has some specific current challenges that are not the run-of-the-mill issues for all urban universities. I note that the violence that occurred during the parade in question seems to have been the work of only a very few participants, and that other participants tried to restrain them and helped the victims.