Q&A with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive prosecutor who often finds himself in the crosshairs of the GOP and local critics, is in search of a third term in office while fending off a Democratic challenger in former Judge Patrick Dugan. 

Krasner spoke with City & State about his latest campaign, the narratives around crime in the city and what his office has prioritized. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

During your first campaign, you branded yourself as a changemaker. How has your message during this campaign differed now that you’re seeking your third term and you might not be considered a political outsider?

The truth is, I am still considered an outsider. That’s kind of silly, but when the Democratic Party three consecutive terms doesn’t endorse me for three consecutive terms – including twice as an incumbent and despite winning in a landslide – there is an aspect of outsider-ism here, and I like it. 

I don’t especially think the insiders have all the answers. Some of them are wonderful and have a ton of answers. Some of them are a mess, which is how we got a president named Trump. So I think it is important that we understand that voters are looking for change, that voters are looking for voices that don’t sound exactly like other people they’ve elected who disappointed them. If that makes me an outsider, so be it. 

Based on conversations you’ve had with residents and ward leaders recently, what’s one area of work your office should continue to build on and what’s an area where there’s a need for improvement?

Let me paraphrase the great Jim Carville, who, when Bill Clinton was running for second term, said: ‘Which part don’t you like, the peace or the prosperity?’ Well, I think it’s a fair question: Which part don’t voters like – the safety or the freedom? Because we are way safer and we are way freer than we were when we first took office, and the data says all of that, but that is not to say that there’s not more progress to be made. 

First of all, we need to keep our foot on the gas when it comes to the massive improvements in gun safety and in gun violence – massive improvements in public safety. We need to keep our foot on the gas because it’s too common in government and politics that when things get better, your attention goes elsewhere. Our attention should stay right on this. It should stay right on investment in prevention. It should stay right on modern law enforcement that uses unbelievably effective forensic techniques that have certainly been a big help in reducing gun violence. 

We have to stay the course with that, but we also have to address what I would describe as kind of a perfect storm of mishandling mental health issues, mishandling the issues of unhoused people and mishandling addiction – especially addiction to opioids that are the direct result of Big Pharma production of pharmaceutical opioids in the United States. 

An extremely high level of Americans use those pharmaceutical opioids, unlike other countries – a footnote here that America is only 5% of the world’s population and produces a massive amount of the world's opioids, and you are consuming more than 25% of the world’s supply of opioids – in a country with 5% of the world’s population. This is how we get to a situation where we see rampant unhoused people. This is how we get to a situation where we see rampant addiction, and this is how you get to a situation where you see rampant retail theft. 

We have to address that perfect storm in a way that doesn’t just repeat the mistake of the past, and that was, of course, take anything you don’t like, even homelessness or the disease of addiction, and call it a criminal act. We have to be willing to be smarter and do things the right way.

What is your pitch to a voter who says they’re progressive – they want to see people facing addiction and homelessness treated with dignity – but at the same time, have concerns about lenience on gun cases and retail theft leading to more disorder?

They need to know the facts. The facts are the longest sentences in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for gun possession come out of Philadelphia. That’s not my opinion, that’s not my data, that’s the data the Pennsylvania House found when they studied it.

We need to reattach ourselves in politics to the truth. The truth is that the management of our gun possession cases in Philadelphia is actually excellent. It’s not a problem. Likewise, people talk about retail theft, which, of course, is a national issue. I’m getting calls from around the country from other prosecutors asking, ‘How did your office do it?’ Because we worked with merchants, we worked with shop owners, we worked with the police to come up with a task force … and the results have been excellent.

It’s an activity that, once again, involves forensics. We’re using an app so that everybody who is trying to address this issue in real-time can communicate with everybody else, and when that small portion of retail thieves who are chronic come in and try to steal things, those nearby are notified. The police nearby are notified. So if a thief makes it out the front door, you can’t just go next door and try to steal there, and then go next door and try to steal there – everybody's going to be ready for that, and it has already resulted in a significant reduction in retail thefts. They're down 8% this year so far.

Once again, there is the political rhetoric saying everything is not working in a city that led the country among big cities last year in improvements in public safety. I think the answers that all politicians should give all the time should be true. But to put it mildly, in an election cycle, there's a whole lot of untruth

What is your response to critics who say you haven’t prioritized sending cases to diversion programs and other youth-focused initiatives that reduce recidivism?

Well, speaking of untruth, there’s actually no administration in the history of the city that comes anywhere close to the massive expansion of diversion that we have brought about. Even just in the juvenile context, there are now three times as many (diversion) programs. It went from about eight to about 25. This narrative of reduced diversion is absurd. There’s not one voter in Philly that’s going to buy it, because they know better. 

And a lot of these diversionary programs are of such a higher caliber compared to what they used to be. Let me just give you an example. We have a very selective diversionary program for law-abiding people who, because they did not get the proper paperwork, were illegally possessing a gun. That’s a little politically dicey, right? We started doing it well over two years ago, and this involves taking a group of 20 people, assigning them a dedicated, full-time social worker to work with all of them on their need for state identification, their need for education, their need to deal with addiction, their need to address trauma and whatever else may be an issue in their life. They work together for six months, and then they come out. 

Here’s the news: When you convict the same group of people – we’ve run the data – you get four new arrests. But when you divert them, and you put all of this investment into getting them going the right way, then we get one arrest – it’s a 75% reduction in recidivism. How does it look like we don’t do diversion? 

There’s a program we created, an emerging adult unit that never existed before, that works very specifically with people 18 to 25 – a group who are more rehabilitated than only older ones. How does that square with this false narrative that we don’t love diversion? I’ve even heard my opposition claim that we ended veterans court, but that's news to me. He should probably come with me on Thursdays to the courtroom, where veterans court occurs every Thursday. 

Sometimes things are just false, and the truth is, we have vastly expanded diversion. I think the real crux of the criticism, though, is we didn’t just repeat bad diversionary programs from the past. We grew the tree, we fertilized the tree, but also pruned it to get rid of programs that were just lawsuits waiting to happen, or were ineffective, or were ones where the public defenders wouldn’t put anybody because the program itself was so draconian it resulted in such terrible outcomes for their clients…That’s a long answer, but it’s also a direct consequence of the irritation I feel (because of) a flat-out lie about what my office is doing.

You’ve also pitched yourself as a democracy advocate and someone who will stand up to an overreaching federal government. Do you think starting legal battles with the Trump administration could impact your bandwidth to do your work within the city?

Let me answer in two ways. No, my bandwidth is to seek justice and that is seeking justice. So if we go by the oath, which is to uphold the laws in the Constitution and seek justice, then this is right down the middle of my highway and it should become a very important focus. I’m concerned for public safety because I know the consequences of eliminating federal law enforcement’s normal priorities. In the first Trump administration, there was a 20-plus-year low in white-collar prosecution. Why? Because Trump’s a white collar criminal and so are his friends. But that’s not where it ends. Once you start gutting a safety net in a country that is increasingly separated in terms of wealth and poverty, you’re going to have more crime. That’s what happens. 

And I don’t want people to miss this – Trump likes crime. Fascists like crime. Right-wing Republican MAGA people like crime and they like it because it gins up a crisis that doesn’t have to be, which allows them to scapegoat different groups of marginalized people so they can eliminate our rights. This is a very old playbook. 

I’m speaking to you as a 63-year-old whose dad volunteered and served in World War II … I grew up knowing a hell of a lot about World War II, the Nazis and the rise of fascism and Mussolini. This is all stuff close to me, and I know exactly where we need to be with this one: loud, proud, standing up and in their faces. These are fundamentally fascists, and it will not do us any good to try to appease them. They are bullies who need to be punched in the face as hard as possible, and that is the only way that all the people around us who are so frightened will understand they can stand up, too. 

What does it say about the Philadelphia Republican Party that it can’t field a candidate in this race?

Well, maybe they're showing good sense for a change; at least they are aware that the things they stand for are so toxic to the vast majority of Philadelphia voters that it couldn't get them anywhere.

Do you take issue with Democratic leadership and some ward leaders choosing not to endorse you as the incumbent?

Let’s understand there's a big difference between the party chairman and ward leaders. I already have overwhelming ward support right now. What I don’t have is the chairman’s (support), and honestly, it’s probably good because now I don’t have to pay for something ineffective. 

These ward leaders, the good ones, are very supportive and they're going to do a great job. …After what we saw with the Democratic leader losing two of the last three presidential elections and the Democratic leader being around when we lost the Democratic senator, there’s no reason why that résumé means it’s a good value for me to give money to the Democratic leader. But the notion that the ward leaders don’t support me is completely false. We have massive ward leader support. We just don’t have the support of the party chair.

What’s another top issue for you during this campaign?

It’s just some of the really basic stuff. When you use a lot of forensics, you get accurate results. You end up not putting innocent people in jail. You end up solving cases that didn’t used to get solved. It is fundamental to public safety that when people contemplating a crime think they’re going to get caught, whether it’s by the geolocation inside their cell phone, from the cameras all over the city, or it’s because there are license plate readers that are going to capture the license plate of their vehicle as they get away from a shooting … they stop. And so to me, it’s just fundamental that we should always be attached to the truth, not only in politics, but more importantly, in the work itself. 

We should be attached to the truth. We need to know the truth about cases. We don’t want to limp around with weak cases based on sweating some 17-year-old in an interrogation room. We want the DNA, and we want it from everything that came from the crime scene, including the fired cartridge cases that came from the crime scene. We want to be able to check all the cell towers and we want to know what texts went back and forth between people in that car. We want to see whether the license plate reader tells me where that license plate was over the last two years, with 100 different data points showing where that license plate was, because the license plate reader can do all of that. 

That is the real beauty of sticking closely to the truth – you don’t put the innocent people in jail while the guilty ones go out and commit more crimes. To me, that’s essential, and perhaps that’s why I get a little animated when it comes to people saying reckless things about how you don’t believe in diversion. Truth matters. It matters even when Trump is the president lying his ass off. It matters even when we’re in a situation where we feel that professional desire to win a case, but maybe we shouldn’t win the case because the truth is pointing in a slightly different direction. It matters. 

I hope, regardless of who wins this election – but I think I know who’s going to win – that there's going to be, in Philadelphia, a haven for the truth, as this whole country seems to be a little confused about why the truth matters.