- Philadelphia's district attorney, Larry Krasner, sat down for an interview with Insider.
- The recently reelected prosecutor addressed criticism he's faced from Republicans and police.
- Krasner also defended his approach to Philadelphia's gun-violence crisis.
Sixteen people a day were shot in Philadelphia last year. By the end of 2021, more than 560 residents of the city had been killed.
It's a national trend: a spike in gun violence that began with the pandemic and has ravaged cities in red, blue, and battleground states. As society locked down, Americans lost jobs and access to community supports and healthy diversions. Personal conflicts leaped from social media to brawls on the street, and record gun sales meant the participants were more likely to be armed — encouraging yet more people to go out and get a firearm.
The reasons behind the spike in violence across the US are complex. In conservative media, though, one villain is obvious and comfortably partisan: the progressive prosecutor. And in Pennsylvania, that means Larry Krasner.
Krasner is an outsider. The former criminal-defense attorney did not come up through the city's Democratic machine, having held no previous elected office, unlike his predecessors over the past several decades. He's also a committed reformer. Since taking office as district attorney in 2018, he's slashed probation sentences, ended the prosecution of sex work and cannabis offenses, and aggressively pursued cases against police officers accused of misconduct. His Conviction Integrity Unit has exonerated about two dozen people his predecessors convicted.
He has, at times, been his own worst enemy. In December, Krasner insisted that the City of Brotherly Love was not experiencing a "crisis of lawlessness," citing the fact that many nonviolent crimes had indeed decreased. It was a gift not only to the likes of Fox News — which ran the chyron "Philly DA Downplays Crime Despite Record Killings" — but also Krasner's critics within the local Democratic Party. The former mayor, Michael Nutter, took to the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer to decry the top prosecutor's "white wokeness."
Republicans, meanwhile, have been in a competition to see who can be more anti-Krasner. In January, the head of the state Senate, Jake Corman, called for the legislature to remove Krasner from office. One failed candidate in the recent GOP gubernatorial primary proposed holding a statewide referendum that would allow the governor to appoint a replacement district attorney.
"It is nothing more than a new version of the Southern strategy," Krasner said during an interview earlier this year at his office over a lunch of soup, potato chips, and a Diet Coke, referring to President Richard Nixon's appeal to a white majority frightened by scenes of civil unrest in the nation's cities. "It worked before. They've read their Republican history. They're saying 'big cities, lawless,' except all the big cities they're talking about are very Democratic and have huge Black and brown populations."
In his view, the coded language of today is more subtle than that of the late 1960s. Instead of directly singling out minorities, his critics go after progressive prosecution, Krasner said.
"I think politically, in many ways, it represents a good strategy," Krasner said. But, he added, it's "really about Black people. It's not about me."
A controversial plea deal feeds attacks
While Krasner might be an accomplished attorney, he was never much of an administrator, which has, at times, provided ammunition to his critics. After taking office, he was eager to replace experienced prosecutors with young lawyers who may not have had much trial experience. And in one episode, the DA's office itself acknowledged that an error by a new prosecutor had created a public-relations disaster.
In 2018, just months into Krasner's tenure, his office reached a plea deal with Jovaun Patterson — who was accused of shooting and nearly killing a Cambodian immigrant with an AK-47 during a botched robbery of a corner store — that would have allowed him to serve a minimum of 3 ½ years in state prison and a maximum of 10 years. The victim was not informed of the relatively lenient sentence.
Facing backlash, the DA's office soon announced that the plea agreement had not been approved by a supervisor. It also tried, without success, to have it thrown out. To Krasner's opponents, it had all the markings of a bleeding-heart liberal coddling violent felons.
Then-US Attorney William McSwain, a Trump appointee, stepped in to pursue federal charges, accusing the DA's office of having "sent a message that violent crime has little consequences." Patterson was ultimately sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for assault and attempted-robbery convictions.
At the very least, the Patterson incident suggested that Krasner led a DA's office that was not functioning as a smooth, cohesive unit.
Nearly four years later, Krasner insisted that while his office is younger, it's also more ethical. Carlos Vega, one of the prosecutors he fired, was involved in the prosecution of Anthony Wright — a man who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder. In 2013, DNA evidence was presented linking another man to the crime. Instead of freeing him, Philadelphia's previous DA, Seth Williams, who claimed to be a reformer, decided to try Wright again, a case that Vega assisted with in court. Wright was found not guilty and freed, with jurors wondering why he was even being prosecuted.
Krasner cast that as emblematic of justice in the city before he came along.
"If the point is you should keep people around who lie, cheat, and steal because the only thing that matters is winning, even if the person is innocent, well, maybe they got a point," Krasner said of prosecutors like Vega. "But that's not justice. And that's not my obligation. My obligation was to actually bring in people who had a moral compass."
But it's not just people like Vega who have left the DA's office in recent years. In December, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that more than 70 lawyers who Krasner himself hired had quit. Some who spoke with the paper cited burnout from an unsustainable workload and worsening morale in the office. Overall, more than 260 attorneys left during his first four-year term.
Clashes with police
Any successful district attorney requires not just a team of competent trial attorneys but also a working — if not necessarily "warm" — relationship with the police.
At the leadership level, at least, that exists in Philadelphia. But there's also a fundamental disagreement between police and prosecutors, as exposed by a recent city report examining gun violence in the city. The police department, led by Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, insists there ought to be an "equal focus" on shootings and illegal gun possession, while the DA is adamant that there is not a correlation between the two.
"If illegal gun possession was a good predictor of that, then I would probably agree with the commissioner," Krasner said. "It's actually a terrible predictor of that."
In a recent report, Krasner's office said the focus on illegal gun possession, at least in cases involving nonviolent offenders with no felony convictions, was about singling out people of color.
"Our legislature's primary interest is incarcerating Philadelphians," the report said, "most of them Black and brown."
The shootings themselves deserve the most attention, Krasner said. And there are plenty of them to solve: As of May 22, more than 830 people had been shot in Philadelphia this year, 166 of them fatally.
"At the point where you take a gun, point it at another person to pull the trigger, whether you kill them or not, there is an accounting — there is a reckoning; that is a heinous and terrible act," Krasner said. "That's exactly the kind of really serious crime that we should focus upon."
John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, believes Krasner is on to something. While some who are arrested on a charge of illegal gun possession intend to use that weapon in a violent crime, the strategy of focusing on illegal possession will pull many who have no such intention into the criminal-justice system, derailing lives and perpetuating distrust in police, he argued in a recent article for Slate.
"Ultimately, these flawed models encourage police to cast broad nets that will end up locking up thousands of people just to prevent dozens of future shootings, imposing significant human and social — and moral — costs that could overwhelm the benefits of such detention," Pfaff wrote.
Krasner insists the fight over guns is all about politics.
"The same thing is happening in basically all the major cities where there are progressive prosecutors," he said. "We're not talking too much about the actual gun violence. We're going to talk all day long about the guns. And there's a lot of reasons for that. You can control the number of gun arrests you get."
Krasner added: "Stop car after car after car after car. In a city where there are more guns than people, you're going to find some guns. You can gin up a ton of gun arrests, sometimes with all kinds of illegal searches that will invalidate prosecution.
"You can harvest guns. I mean, that's not hard to do. What's hard to do is to solve shootings — and to solve fatal shootings. It's a more difficult task."
Christopher Herrmann, a former crime analyst at the New York City Police Department who is now an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tends to agree.
Like in Philadelphia, "there's so much pressure right now here in New York City to take illegal guns off the street," Herrmann said. And they should be taken off the street, he added.
"But I think a lot of people just equate — you know, if we have a 30% increase in guns off the street that equals a 30% decrease in the number of shootings and stuff like that," he said. "And that's just not how it happens."
'Legit cops hate dirty cops'
Police officers are generally less likely to engage in overtly illegal behavior to secure an arrest than in the past. That, at least, is Krasner's read on declining clearance rates — the number of homicides committed in a year compared to the number of homicides that have resulted in an arrest. In the 1980s, the clearance rate was over 80%; now it's less than 50%.
A 2021 report from his office said that in the past police sometimes engaged in "egregious misconduct" to ostensibly solve a case, such as intimidating or bribing supposed witnesses to give testimony the police wanted.
Krasner said there are still holdovers from "the Frank Rizzo era" of the 1970s, a reference to the mayor and former police chief who oversaw a department that, at one point, shot one civilian each week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2020. Some of these officers are themselves criminals in the eyes of the DA. Take Joseph Bologna. In 2020, Krasner's office pursued charges against the former police commander — who was fired by the department — after video emerged of him striking a Temple University student during a racial-justice protest.
While prosecutors and outraged members of the public saw an assault, Bologna's defenders characterized it as an attack on police.
"This is another attempt by DA Krasner to railroad a highly decorated and well-respected member of the Philadelphia Police Department," John McNesby, the president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said at the time.
The war of words between McNesby and Krasner has been constant — and, in some ways, advantageous for a district attorney eager to cast his opponents as relics of a with-us-or-against-us era of abusive policing.
That said, McNesby doesn't speak for all or even most police officers, Krasner said. Associations for Black and Latino officers, for example, endorsed the DA's reelection campaign.
"Legit cops hate dirty cops — that's been my experience, over and over," Krasner said.
Last year, police arrested suspects in only about one-third of homicide cases in Philadelphia, according to the DA's office. It took an average of 35 minutes for an officer to respond to a 911 call, according to an analysis by The Inquirer, four minutes longer than in the prior year. And the number of police claiming to be too injured to work has more than doubled since Krasner was elected, with 14% of the city's law-enforcement officers collecting a tax-free salary while at home on disability — or, The Inquirer found, working second jobs.
Forty years ago, Philadelphia police engaged in a "work slowdown" to protest budget cuts. The police have not been defunded — its $729 million slice of the city's budget is second only to pensions — but morale, here as elsewhere, is down in the wake of the 2020 protests against killings by law enforcement.
Could history be repeating, this time with police protesting Krasner's prosecution of their fellow officers?
Herrmann, the former NYPD analyst, told Insider the 2020 social-justice protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing, and the increased distrust of police since, has influenced morale in departments across the country and, consequently, their ability to solve crimes. When there's a shooting, for example, eyewitnesses may be less willing to cooperate with the police investigation. Police, in turn, could blame the community. When the crime isn't solved, they may blame each other.
But, Herrmann said, work slowdowns or stoppages ("the infamous 'blue flu,' we call it") tend to "last a couple weeks or maybe a couple months, at most." Those who haven't left the force, he added, may well be deciding not to give it their all, worn out by the pandemic, the ensuing rise in violent crime, and increased criticism of law enforcement as an institution.
"That's happening in a lot of cities now, which is: the distrust and the lack of faith — and the lack of cooperation, maybe we'll even call it — between the police department and the prosecutor's office," Herrmann said.
Each side accuses the other of having the wrong priorities, with the department wanting to focus more on gun-possession cases and Krasner saying the department has underinvested in modern forensic technology that could help solve more cold cases.
"There seems to be a lot more riffs," Krasner said.
Krasner said he didn't believe that such riffs could have led to police in his city to consciously do their jobs poorly as a means of expressing displeasure with his office.
"That is one of the most awful and cynical things I've ever heard, actually, because that would be criminal conduct," Krasner said when asked about the possibility. "Wouldn't it?"
He continued: "If that is true — and I'm not saying it is true — but if that is true, then what you are suggesting is a lot worse than disinterest in highly effective modern methods," he said. "What you're suggesting is that they want crime to win so that they can go back to no accountability — and maybe more compensation."
"And," he said, "that's what criminal organizations do."
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