Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner won a hard-fought campaign in 2017 amid a rising wave of dissent over police shootings of unarmed people of color and calls to reform criminal justice policies that harm the nation’s most vulnerable communities.
Five years later, following a resounding reelection
victory in 2021, Krasner is among progressive prosecutors across the country
who face Republican-backed efforts to remove them from office, writes Peter Hall of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
Criminal justice experts call the attacks an affront
to democracy and an effort to forestall the criminal justice reform movement
that reached critical mass after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“A key premise of our democracy is, let people
decide what’s right for their community,” Akhi Johnson, director of the Reshaping
Prosecution Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.
District attorneys in California, New York, and
Florida who advanced policies to end mass incarceration, cash bail and rethink
the approach to prosecuting minor crimes have faced efforts by state lawmakers
or Republican Party leaders to remove them from office.
The majority-Republican state House passed a
resolution in July to empanel a select committee to investigate the Philadelphia
district attorney’s office with a goal of establishing support for Krasner’s
impeachment.
“For people who don’t live in those areas to come in
and say, ‘No no no, we know better than you do,’ certainly raises concerns from
a democratic perspective and further raises the question, why not let people
vote on the issue,” Johnson said.
Fordham Law School professor John Pfaff said examining
election results and crime data refutes the notion that those most affected by
violent crime want progressive prosecutors removed from office.
Pfaff compared support for the winners in the last
two elections for district attorney in Philadelphia and Chicago, where
pro-reform candidate Kim Foxx was reelected in 2020, with the locations of gun
crimes.
The resulting maps show the areas with the most
support for the progressive candidates are also the areas with the highest
concentrations of gun crime.
“The fact that Krasner’s support is the best where
violence is worst … makes the idea that, ‘We’re stepping in for victims,’ just
not true,” Pfaff said.
“There are so
many types of crime there will always be one that you can try to weaponize as a
story,” Pfaff said.
John Holloway, executive director of the Quattrone
Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of
Pennsylvania, said blaming a prosecutor for trends in crime is too simplistic.
“Gun crime in Philadelphia is an unbelievable
problem and I get it, but I dont know of any study that says that is caused by
the way Larry Krasner prosecutes crime,” Holloway said.
Kransner’s approach has been to redirect his
office’s resources away from prosecuting low-level crimes such as shoplifting,
marijuana and prostitution and to not request cash bail for offenses such as
drunken driving. In his first year in office, that resulted in 20 percent fewer
cases being filed.
Meanwhile, Krasner has focused on holding those in
power, including police officers, accountable, preventing wrongful convictions,
and promoting alternatives to jail for those with substance use disorders and
mental illnesses.
“There are some areas that are getting more
attention. There are some that are getting less. Whether that’s a good thing
depends on your point of view,” Holloway said.
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