Three Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania are looking to take down Philadelphia's progressive Democrat district attorney — Larry Krasner — in the wake of San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin's ouster by recall voters last week.
State Reps. Timothy O’Neal, Josh Kail, and Torren Ecker announced their push to remove DA Krasner via impeachment this week for what they call a dereliction of duty to uphold the laws of Philadelphia and prosecute those who break them in a year where more than 220 homicides have already been counted.
"This is about the fact that he is willfully failing to do his job," O'Neal said this week at a press conference announcing the Republicans' intent to impeach Krasner.
The under-fire DA, though, is sticking to his soft-on-crime agenda and, publicly at least, continuing the charade that his woke policies are a good thing. "There is nothing new about there being resistance when you’re trying to bring meaningful change and you’re trying to change society,” Krasner said this week sounding like Chesa Boudin. “What they are doing in terms of impeachment is clearly without a legal basis, it is clearly unconstitutional, and that will all come out as this proceeds — if it proceeds at all,” he claimed trying to brush aside the scrutiny.
But in reality, the City of Brotherly Love is not so loving these days — violent crime has skyrocketed since Krasner took office in 2018. In 2021, Philly was one of 12 cities to smash their annual homicide record set in 1990 with more than 520 slayings. In December of last year, Krasner was asked about the spiking crime in the city whose laws he's supposed to enforce and whose citizens he's supposed to protect. His response, as Townhall reported, was literally unbelievable:
"We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence," the district attorney said at his weekly news briefing in South Philadelphia according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "It’s important that we don’t let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime," Krasner added.
That kind of brazen ignorance and attempt to brush aside a record-setting number of homicides as not a crime or violence crisis — while still refusing to take a tough-on-crime position — that made him a target for those who want to see law and order restored in Philadelphia.
Instead of cracking down on crime and putting criminals behind bars, Krasner has, for years, pursued "shorter sentences, diverting low-level offenses from the justice system, and charging crimes at a lower level."
In addition to shorter sentences, policies Krasner has enacted include cutting back post-sentence supervision of those who are convicted. A policy he rolled out in 2019 meant that "someone facing a misdemeanor drug charge, who in the past might have faced a sentence of three to 23 months in jail, plus a year on probation, would instead face just three to six months in jail, plus at most nine months’ probation."
When it comes to more serious crimes, the policy aimed at ending "mass supervision" meant that someone "convicted of a felony who in the past may have received two to four years in prison plus two years probation would now receive that prison time plus six months or at most one year of probation."
Even more recently, in early June, Krasner was rebuked for his attempt to pin blame for shootings in Philly on the NRA and law-abiding firearm owners while calling for more gun control laws. Additional laws, Krasner's critics pointed out, wouldn't stop criminals from using illegal guns to commit their crimes. Nor would Krasner be likely to enforce new laws — he's said so himself. "We do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings," the district attorney once said.
While it's unclear how far the Pennsylvania legislators' attempt to hold Krasner accountable will go, Boudin's recall in San Francisco — which would not have happened without Democrat voters — should give the any DA tied to the so-called "progressive prosecutor" movement pause.