In 2017, Larry Krasner was among the first candidates in the country to run as a “progressive prosecutor” in his successful campaign for Philadelphia district attorney. That wave swept across the country, with left-wing lawyers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan, and elsewhere following the Krasner model: running for the chief prosecutor’s office while promising to decrease prosecutions.
In California, even heavily Democratic cities soon found these prosecutors to be too focused on “decarceration” and not enough on the traditional job of putting criminals in jail. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was removed in
a recall election earlier this year
. In Los Angeles, George Gascon narrowly avoided having his own recall placed on the ballot.
AT LEAST THE ROBOTS DON’T HAVE GUNS
Pennsylvania does not have recall elections. Removing elected officials from their jobs requires impeachment by the state House of Representatives and conviction in the state Senate, an exact copy of the federal impeachment system. On Nov. 16,
the House voted to impeach Krasner
. The Senate plans to take up the
impeachment trial on Jan. 18
, the first such action there since 1993.
The state House was controlled by Republicans when it voted to impeach (party control at present is still undetermined as Democrats took 102 seats in the midterm elections but one member died before the election, leaving a 101-101 tie). Republicans also command a large majority in the state Senate. Given the partisan makeup of his opponents, Krasner, a Democrat, has proclaimed the effort an “
anti-democratic authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes.
”
Harrisburg Republicans and Philadelphia Democrats being at odds is nothing new. But never before has the state GOP tried to remove a local official from that deeply Democratic city, no matter how badly mismanaged it had become. As in San Francisco and Los Angeles, disgust with the state of affairs in the district attorney’s office reached beyond the usual partisan sniping.
The House passed
seven articles of impeachment
, mostly centered on Krasner’s refusal to do his job in the way that, in the House’s view, it is meant to be done. Democrats have held the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office since 1991, but after 30 years as a defense attorney, Krasner came to the office with a different attitude toward the job than most.
He told the
New York Times
after winning the 2017 Democratic primary that he planned “to cut down on the prosecution of minor cases, divert drug addicts into treatment and ignore, where appropriate, what he described as draconian sentencing guidelines.” He also called for an end to cash bail.
The subsequent rise in crime has been meteoric. To take the most prominent and heinous example, murders in Philadelphia have doubled since Krasner took office. From a yearly mark of 258 murders in 2016,
homicides in the city climbed to a record 519 in 2021
. Many of Krasner’s defenders paint the rise in violent crime as an artifact of the coronavirus lockdowns, but the murder rate had already climbed to 328 in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. Lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter riots only added to an existing trend of increased lawlessness.
That alone would be troubling, but murder was not the only crime to soar. Liberals talk about getting illegal guns off the streets, but Philadelphia’s progressive prosecutor has done the opposite. A look at the
District Attorney’s Office’s statistics
shows that the rate at which Krasner’s office withdrew gun charges in Philadelphia grew from 17% in 2015 to 61% in 2021. Far from disarming criminals, Krasner created a system in which the majority of people arrested on gun charges in Philadelphia faced no penalty at all.
Krasner’s response to these alarming statistics? In January of this year, his office said, “
We do not believe
that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings.”
Rising crime is not the only problem the legislature has with Krasner. He has also been accused of abusing the grand jury process when prosecuting the only defendants he does zealously pursue: police officers. In July of this year, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty, a Democrat, wrote a separate concurring opinion castigating Krasner for “
concerning irregularities
” in his prosecution of Officer Ryan Pownall. Pownall was charged with murder for fatally shooting a man after he was stopped while riding a dirt bike and carrying an illegal gun in North Philadelphia. Dougherty accused Krasner of fostering “a win-at-all-cost office culture that treats police officers differently than other criminal defendants.”
A federal judge added his voice to the chorus in September. Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
sharply criticized Krasner’s office
for misconduct in its effort to vacate the death sentence imposed on Robert Wharton after he murdered two people in a grisly 1984 attack. The judge noted that the District Attorney’s Office had withheld facts from the court concerning Wharton’s behavior while in jail and, more troublingly, claimed that the victims’ family members supported the sentence reduction when they had, in fact, not even been contacted.
Krasner characterizes his impeachment as an attempt to overturn the will of the people of Philadelphia. In one way, he is correct: He was reelected in 2021, when much of this information was already known. But in another way, the objection is irrelevant. Impeachment is always an overturning of the last election — that’s the whole point. And many of the more egregious offenses the House articles cited have happened since that reelection.
Moreover,
as House leaders pointed out
, this extreme lawlessness can no longer be called a problem just for Philadelphians. Crime does not stop at a line on the map, and the culture of criminality that has metastasized in Philadelphia these past five years has begun to spill into the surrounding counties, where voters never agreed to be part of Krasner’s progressive experiment.
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Democrats in the state legislature who stand by Krasner turn a blind eye to a problem that has led even the left-wing San Francisco electorate to revolt. Crime has risen in lockstep with the rise of progressive prosecutors and has made parts of major cities unlivable. Ignoring crime has not made it go away, and as we saw in the California recalls and the New York governor’s race last month, the issue resonates with voters across the political spectrum.
Krasner’s impeachment reflects his particular failings as Philadelphia’s district attorney, but it is also part of an undeniable pattern: When the government fails to protect the people from crime, the people will seek a new government. Krasner’s election was the start of a trend in anti-enforcement law enforcement. His impeachment and potential removal could be part of another trend, a return to normalcy in criminal justice.
Kyle Sammin is the editor-at-large at
Broad + Liberty
and the co-host of the Conservative Minds
podcast
. Follow him on Twitter @KyleSammin.
