What is the mechanism of action you propose made Philadelphia turn out differently than Camden. Like you said the water cannons and riot cops. But what did those do exactly? Do you mean that by reacting harshly to black rioting, it leads to a tamping down/demoralizing of local black integrationist activism and a reduction in the penetration of local institutions by black middle-class liberals? Or is it something else?
Like \u201cif you the roll the tanks in to Harlem in 1968, in the long term you prevent someone like David Dinkins from getting elected mayor of New York\u201d?
And then if the Dinkinses of the world become mayors, what do they do differently in power than their white predecessors? What policies lead to urban decay and surging crime?
Well when it came down to it Philly was a major finance/law/government agency office tower historic core city and Camden was the outer borough fringe; Manhattan got bad but did not burn like the Bronx.
Philly had a strong white ethnic unionized machine base\ufffc (incl. the police under commissioner-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo) which maintained a hold on power across black popular majorities; though Philly had a black mayor 84-92 there was a sense that only with the 2000 election of John Street had black political power arrived (the time when the police, largely autonomously, firebombed a black radical group from the air was under that first black mayor. It was basically a guerilla revolutionary cult that had been loudly aiming towards a big apocalyptic showdown all along from a fortified block; given experiences ranging from the Karl-Marx-Hof in the Austrian Civil War to contemporary radical base shootouts in LA it was entirely reasonable to conclude it could not be stormed without significant casualties; this is basically what SWAT units would go on to get body armor and tanks for)
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