There were 16 people shot a day in Philadelphia. More than 500 people were killed by the end of the year.
There has been a spike in gun violence that has ravaged cities in red, blue, and battleground states. Americans lost jobs and access to supports when society was locked down. Personal conflicts leaped from social media to brawls on the street, and record gun sales encouraged more people to get a firearm.
There are many reasons for the increase in violence. The progressive prosecutor is one of the main villains in conservative media. That is Larry Krasner in Pennsylvania.
Krasner is not familiar with the outside world. Unlike his predecessors, the former criminal defense attorney did not come up through the city's Democratic machine. He is a reformer as well. He aggressively pursued cases against police officers accused of wrongdoing after taking office as District Attorney. The Conviction Integrity Unit has exonerated many people.
At times he has been his own worst enemy. Krasner said in December that the City of Brotherly Love was not experiencing a crisis of lawlessness because there had been a decrease in non-violent crimes. Krasner's critics within the local Democratic Party as well as Fox News received a gift. The former mayor took to the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer to criticize the top prosecutor.
Republicans are competing to see who can be more against Krasner. Jake Corman, the head of the state Senate, called for Krasner to be removed from office. A failed candidate in the recent GOP gubernatorial primary wanted to hold a statewide referendum that would allow the governor to appoint a new district attorney.
In an interview earlier this year, Krasner said that it was a new version of the Southern strategy, referring to President Richard Nixon's appeal to a white majority frightened by civil unrest. It did work before. They've read about the Republicans. All of the big cities they're talking about are very Democratic and have large black and brown populations.
He thinks the language of today is more subtle than it was in the 1960's. Critics go after progressive prosecution instead of singling out minorities.
Krasner thinks it is a good strategy. He said it's really about black people. I don't think it's about me.
Krasner was an accomplished attorney, but he was never much of an administrator, which has provided fodder to his detractors. He wanted to replace experienced prosecutors with young lawyers who didn't have a lot of trial experience. The public-relations disaster was caused by an error by a new prosecutor.
The office of Krasner reached a plea deal with Jovaun Patterson, who was accused of shooting and nearly killing a Cambodian immigrant with an AK-47 during a robbery of a corner store, that would have allowed him to serve a minimum of 3. The victim was not made aware of the sentence.
The plea agreement was not approved by a supervisor according to the office of the district attorney. It tried to throw it out. It had all the markings of a liberal coddling violent felons.
William McSwain, the US Attorney at the time, accused the office of sending a message that violent crime has little consequences. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for his crimes.
The Patterson incident suggested that Krasner's office wasn't functioning as it should have been.
Krasner insisted that his office is more ethical than it is young. One of the prosecutors he fired was involved in the case of Anthony Wright, who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder. A man was linked to the crime with the use of genetic material. Philadelphia's previous district attorney, who claimed to be a reformer, decided to try Wright again instead of freeing him. The jury wondered why Wright was being prosecuted after he was found not guilty.
It was an example of justice in the city before Krasner arrived.
"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," said Krasner. That isn't justice. That's not something I have to do. I had to bring in people with a moral compass.
There are other people who have left the office in the last few years. More than 70 lawyers who were hired by Krasner have quit. According to some people who spoke with the paper, there is a lot of stress in the office. More than 260 attorneys left during his first four years in office.
A successful district attorney needs a team of competent trial attorneys and a working relationship with the police.
There is a leadership level in Philadelphia. There is a fundamental disagreement between police and prosecutors, exposed by a recent city report. There should be an equal focus on shootings and illegal gun possession according to the police department led by Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.
Krasner said he would agree with the commissioner if illegal gun possession was a predictor of that. It's not a good predictor of that.
In a recent report, Krasner's office said the focus on illegal gun possession was about singling out people of color.
Most of the Philadelphians are black and brown according to the report.
Krasner said that the shootings themselves deserved the most attention. There are more than 800 people who have been shot in Philadelphia this year and 166 of them have died.
"At the point where you take a gun, point it at another person and kill them or not, there is an accounting, that is a heinous and terrible act," Krasner said. That's the kind of crime that we should be focused on.
A professor at a law school thinks Krasner is right. 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 intentions into the criminal-justice system.
"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."
The fight over guns is about politics, says Krasner.
In most major cities there are progressive prosecutors. We are not talking about gun violence. We are going to discuss the guns all day. There are many reasons for that. The number of gun arrests can be controlled.
Krasner said to stop cars after cars after cars. There are more guns in a city than people. It's possible to make a lot of gun arrests with illegal searches.
You have the ability to harvest firearms. That isn't hard to do. It's difficult to solve fatal and shooting incidents. It's not easy.
Christopher Herrmann is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and he tends to agree.
New York City is under a lot of pressure to take illegal guns off the streets. He said they should be removed from the street.
A 30% increase in guns off the street equates to a 30% decrease in the number of shootings. That isn't how it happens.
Police officers are less likely to engage in criminal behavior in order to get an arrest. The number of homicides committed in a year compared to the number of homicides that result in an arrest is what Krasner is reading. The clearance rate in the 1980s was over 80%.
In the past, police have sometimes engaged in "egregious misconduct" to solve a case, such as intimidating witnesses to give testimony the police wanted.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2020 that 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 shot one civilian each week. The officers are criminals in the eyes of the opposition party. TakeJoseph Bologna. Krasner's office pursued charges against the former police commander after video emerged of him hitting a Temple University student during a protest.
Bologna's defenders characterized the attack on police as an attack on them.
The president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police said that this was another attempt by the district attorney to railroad a member of the Philadelphia Police Department.
The war of words between McNesby and Krasner has been going on for a long time, and it's good for the district attorney to use it to his advantage.
Krasner said that McNesby does not speak for most police officers. The associations for black and Latino officers supported the reelection campaign of the district attorney.
Krasner said thatLegit cops hate dirty cops.
According to the district attorney's office, only about one-third of Philadelphia homicides were solved last year. An analysis by The Inquirer shows that it took 35 minutes for an officer to respond to a call. The number of police who claim to be too injured to work has more than doubled since Krasner took office.
Forty years ago, Philadelphia police slowed down their work to protest. The police department's $729 million slice of the city's budget is second only to pensions, but it has not been defunded despite the protests against killings by law enforcement.
Police are protesting the prosecution of their fellow officers.
The social-justice protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing and the increased distrust of police have influenced the ability of departments to solve crimes, according to the former NYPD analyst. Eyewitnesses may be less willing to cooperate with the police when there is a shooting. The police could be blamed for the community's problems. They might blame each other if the crime isn't solved.
The "blue flu," as it's called, tends to last a couple weeks or maybe a couple months, at most. He said that those who haven't left the force may decide not to give it their all, worn out by the Pandemic, the rise in violent crime, and increased criticism of law enforcement.
"That's happening in a lot of cities now, which is the distrust and the lack of faith, and the lack of cooperation between the police department and the prosecutor's office."
Krasner says the department has under invested in modern forensic technology that could help solve more cold cases, while the department wants to focus more on gun possession cases.
Krasner said there seemed to be more riffs.
Krasner didn't think that police in his city would do their jobs poorly in order to express displeasure with him.
Krasner said that it would be criminal conduct if that happened. Isn't it possible?
"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 not using modern methods," he said. They want crime to win so that they can go back to no accountability, and maybe more compensation.
He said that criminal organizations do that.
Tell us about a news story. C Davis is the reporter for Insider.com.
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