Philly DA Protects Criminals While Skipping His Taxes

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, boasts about the drop in prosecutions under his leadership while his city is setting records on homicides.  Last year, Philly, with a population of 1.6 million, had 562 homicides.  For perspective,  Los Angeles has population of 3.9 million and suffered 397 homicides in 2021.  Attorney Hans Bader, writing in Liberty Unyielding notes that the press seems to give Krasner, and other Soros-bankrolled progressive (read pro-criminal) district attorneys a pass.  In addition to implementing policies that have his office declining to prosecute criminals at two-and-one-half times the rate of his predecessor,  Krasner “owes the city $83,406.50 in back taxes, a story Big Trail published back on April 26th.  For more than two months now, the D.A. has held weekly press conferences typically on Mondays.  And not once has any reporter in  town had the guts to ask the D.A. when he was going to pay up.”

When he first took office back in January 2018, Krasner’s first official act was to fire 31 senior prosecutors…The new Philly D.A., a career criminal defense lawyer who had never prosecuted a traffic stop, replaced the most senior prosecutors in his office with a combination of social justice warriors, former public defenders and woke progressives fresh out of law school.

The result was that criminals remained free to kill innocent people. 21-year-old Jailene Holton was shot to death by a man that Krasner’s office failed to convict of rape despite overwhelming evidence, such as text messages. Krasner’s office assigned an inexperienced recent hire who had previously interned in a public defender’s office to prosecute the case. He bungled the case, so the defendant walked free. Seven months later, that man shot Jailene Holton to death in a rage.

The D.A.’s own Data Dashboard shows how inept the D.A.’s office is at obtaining guilty verdicts under Krasner. According to the D.A.’s own stats, the percentage of guilty verdicts won at trial have gone from 17% of all criminal cases in 2014 under former D.A. Seth Williams, all the way down to just 2% of all criminal cases prosecuted last year under D.A. Krasner.”

The Marshall Project reports that when murder spiked in Philadelphia and eight other big cities in 2020, “more than 85% of the increase took place in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods,” so the vast majority of the people killed as a result were black or Hispanic.

As NBC reported,

When Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s liberal district attorney, was asked this month about the city’s crime surge that includes an unprecedented 550 homicides this year, he appeared to play it down. “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness,” Krasner said. “We don’t have a crisis of crime. We don’t have a crisis of violence.”… Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor who is African American, erupted at Krasner, accusing him of dismissing the pain of Black residents who suffer from the violence while purporting to support them. “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends … ’ All that bulls—,” Nutter said in an interview.

The bad news for Philadelphia is that there is no clear path for the public to remove Krasner until the next election.   Two Krasner clones, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascon faced the voters wrath over the past few weeks.   Boudin was recalled by 61% of San Francisco voters at the June 7th primary.  The recall-Gascon campaign just turned in 717,000 signatures…150,000 more than required, to put his recall on the ballot.  It appears that the public is not as stupid as progressive Democrats had been counting on.