Larry Krasner's 'Progressive Prosecution'

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. When Larry Krasner was elected as Philadelphia's district attorney in 2017, it brought the term progressive prosecutor out of the fringes and into the mainstream. He promised among other things not to prosecute marijuana possession, and cash bail, and look for creative ways to offer less jail time. That's not what we used to think of is the goals of a prosecutor.

The movement has since grown and now more than 30 million Americans live in a city or county with a district attorney who could be considered a reformer along those lines, but what was popular four years ago looks different in a pandemic reality where violent crime and shootings have skyrocketed in major cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Critics of Krasner and others say bail reform and more lenient sentencing directly and police pull backs in the face of public criticism lead to more crime. While progressives counter that larger societal factors are leading to that crime like unemployment caused by a pandemic.

Well, with me now is Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner. He also has a new book called For the People: A Story of Justice and Power, and he's up for reelection this year. The primary is may 18th. The Krasner model is also a topic of discussion in the race to succeed Cyrus Vance in the race for Manhattan DA. Mr. Krasner, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Larry Krasner: Brian, please call me Larry. Happy to be here.

Brian: What's a progressive prosecutor to you and do you use that term yourself?

Larry: I do use it. What is it to me? It is a prosecutor interested in science, interested in truth. It's a modern prosecutor interested in evidence based approaches that realizes criminal justice should have gone the way of medicine a very long time ago. Meaning towards prevention as the primary strategy and towards rehabilitation, fixing the things that cause crime rather than just punishing it.

Brian: You ask in your book, "How does an extremely punitive criminal justice jurisdiction built on traditional prosecution destroy itself?" Is that how you see your role destroying rather than reforming traditional prosecution?

Larry: What I was referring to is that I believe that mass incarceration in the most incarcerated country in the world has caused its own ending, and that what we are seeing now with the rapid spread of progressive prosecution around the country something that, by the way, began before me. We had Kim Fox elected in Chicago, we had Aramis Ayala elected in Orlando, there have been models even before that Dan Satterberg in Seattle, for example, George Gascón, when he was the DA in San Francisco, I was by no means the first one to get here.

What we are seeing is that the people know what they want and what they want is for the United States, the land of freedom, not to be the most incarcerated country. They can look around, they can see that they have too many kids in a public school classroom and they have it because we spent all our money on jails and we didn't spend it on the things that would actually make a safer like good public education like treatment for people with mental illness.

We have seen the 85% decimation of what used to be our mental health system, and its replacement with jail cells, and with police officers being first responders to the mentally ill. This is an untenable situation, the people get it. The problem is that the institutions don't get it yet and the people need to get them there, which is in large part why I wrote this book. There there are stories of people I saw and I knew things I lived through as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney for 30 years that stuck with me that I've told many times that I told on the campaign trail. I think that that conversation needs to happen because it's through those stories we really understand what has to change.

Brian: Listeners, any questions our lines are open for Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner. Usually, the DA questions you, today you can question the DA. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet a question at Brian Lehrer. Some things your office has achieved in the past four years, just to put some numbers on them. Reducing the jail population I see by 30%, reducing the use of cash bail, limiting parole, and probation terms, terms of their length. Obviously, there's an appetite for these reforms since you were elected.

You've also spoken about resistance that you faced from lawyers, from judges, many of whom are former prosecutors themselves, can you talk a little bit about that resistance and how it's impacted your mission and maybe even the outcome of certain cases of judges aren't always on your side philosophically.

Larry: Sure I was blessed that early on in my career I decided to make a professional hobby of representing protesters for free, something I felt strongly about. We were in a city where when good people got together to non violently seek social change, the response was for police and prosecutors to go for their throats. They did it over and over. I got a lot of practice, but what it meant was that I had to study great social justice movements, how long they take? What is their progress? What is their arc? I view what is happening nationally with progressive prosecution as being a great social movement. This is the kind of thing that has to move forward at the level of culture, it's the kind of thing that takes 30 years.

While I see this resistance, I also see it as entirely normal, and entirely natural. There's an old phrase, which is that, first they ignore you, and then they laugh at you, and then they fight you and then you win. Well, we are all the way up to fight. What we are seeing is that the old guard, people who are dug into an old way of thinking, young or old may not be the issue in terms of chronology of their lives, but what we are seeing is that they're shaking their fist, and they're fighting us. Number one, because they have to. Number two, because they are taking what we are doing, the reversal of taking the land of freedom and making it the most incarcerated country.

The reversal of a terribly racist system, a system that crushes poor people. They're seeing the reversal of all of that as the reversal of what they did because it is. So some of them push back. It is an indication to me, frankly, of how successful we have been in certain areas in moving progress forward. Just to give you an example, right before the pandemic shut down the courts, the Philadelphia courts were generating half as many years of incarceration as they had been in a prior administration, half. We cut it in half in three years. Any company talks about 10% growth, or 10% reduction of cost and gets misty, we're talking about enormous changes.

We've reduced the level of mass supervision, meaning excess of probation and parole in the most over supervised city among the big cities in the United States. We have reduced that by nearly two thirds in terms of future years. It turns out that just as prosecutors who were very punitive could slam on the gas on this mess, we can slam on the brakes, and we can bring about meaningful and serious change fairly quickly.

Brian: You know what at least a portion of the audience is thinking hearing you say that and roll out those stats, that Philadelphia like New York and other cities has seen a spike in homicides, they are up 29%, compared with this time in 2020 even, which was the most violent year in three decades during the pandemic. Critics of your office say that bail and sentencing reforms have allowed violent offenders to stay on the street and commit more crimes of various types. That conversation as you well know is happening here in New York as well as in Philadelphia. Bail reform is another topic of it here. How do you respond to that line of attack and do you have an alternative theory as to what's happening?

Larry: Now I say, "Show me your study?" Which they do not have and then I show them mine. We have done multiple studies including one we just released yesterday, that establish conclusively that our policies around reducing probation and parole have not increased crime at all. We have produced a study which we did a couple years ago, and we showed conclusively that our attitude towards bail had not increased crime at all, and they don't have rival studies. This is part of the problem with criminal justice, is that it has been a cesspool of hunches and aphorisms and phrases that are completely unscientific in ways that we would never accept in terms of medicine.

Now, let me get more specific, though, on the gun violence issue. So these are the facts and feel free to google it, you will find the articles to support it. The fact is that last year was the year with the largest number of homicides in United States history. The national level of homicide including in Cornfields was up an average of 18% and the average in major American cities was up 40% okay?

They took a look at the 34 biggest cities in the United States and what they actually found, I'll just speak about Philly because I know the stats better, they ranked them according to worst and not as bad, but things got worse. Almost every single city went up. As I said before, the average for these big cities was a 40% increase in gun violence. Meanwhile, by the way, crime in general down a little bit. Violent crime, in general, a category that includes shootings down a little bit, but it was up a terrible 40%.

Cities that were up 20% were actually feeling good, when any other year they would have felt terrible. Some cities were up 100%, 108%, 85%, 90% at these very high levels. they ranked these cities, with number one being the worst for the increased. Number two being the second worst out of those 34 cities, Philadelphia was number 23. It was actually toward the bottom. As you look at these cities, what you saw is that some were Republican, some were Democrat, some have progressive prosecutors, some had very traditional prosecutors.

There was no thread that followed the philosophical or political lines on this notion that progressive prosecutors did this. This is just an old right-wing tactic to claim that when anything bad happens, we need to clamp down on everything. Even when they're in charge, their answer is never, "Oh, I guess our right-wing policies didn't work." Their answer is always, Well, that means we need to clamp down even more." What we actually see though is that every one of these cities had the same series of problems that your listeners are seeing every day and they go as follows.

This is young people killing young people. Almost all young men killing young men. Here's the reality. There have been no organized sports in school or out of school over the past year because of the pandemic. That has never happened in my life and I'm 60 years old. High school classrooms have been closed. Summer jobs programs closed. Summer camps closed. Rec centers have been closed. Swimming pools have been closed.

Normal employment in a low dollar economy during the pandemic, when everybody making less than 40,000 got smashed. Kind of stuff I used to do when I was a teenager and I would be in the back of a rusty van with a cardboard box. We were hauling broken plaster for some kitchen remodeler, that kind of stuff. That employment has disappeared. Houses of worship closed, arts programs that happen in school, which are so crucial to us, all of that closed.

What we are actually seeing is that the common thread is that we have underestimated how incredibly helpful and protected these preventative type programs are. We should reinvest in them more than before, but the second side of it is that every one of these cities is going through a situation where courts are closed. Philly, courts have effectively been closed for basically 90% of their activity for an entire year.

Probation and parole have not been able to see anyone in person, either in their supervisee's home or in the office for an entire year. The only checking in is by phone and policing is not what it was. They are limited. It's not their fault, but they're limited by the circumstances of the pandemic. What do we do with this national tragedy? Well, if we're on the right, what we do is we weaponize it for cheap politics.

If we're on the left, we're honest about it. We actually point to studies that show exactly what I'm saying. John Pfaff, who is a professor at Fordham and wrote a very important book about mass incarceration called Locked In is also an economist and did a study of this. You can read about it. I believe it is either out already in the New Republic or will be shortly. The New York Times has reported on it. They will tell you exactly what I just said about what is going on with these 34 major cities.

Yet what we're going to hear from the leadership of the local police unions, the people who endorsed Donald Trump, the people who call Black Lives Matter, "animals" which are leadership of the FOP, which is the Fraternal Order of Police did in Philadelphia. What you're going to hear from them is this throwback caveman talk about how-- Well, obviously, if something bad has happened, it couldn't possibly be any player except our local progressive prosecutor who was holding police accountable in the time of George Floyd.

Brian: Gwen in Queens. You're on WNYC with Philadelphia, DA Larry Krasner known as a progressive prosecutor. Now the author of For the People: A Story of Justice and Power. Hi, Gwen.

Gwen: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Mr. Krasner, I congratulate you on finding and obtaining relief for 18 people who were wrongfully incarcerated, but if not for you then your election and your different approach to crime, those men would still be there. I want to thank you for that and I'm sure the families that were-- The men that were taken from their loved ones have thanked you tremendously as well.

Also, I just want to know whether Ronald Castille, the former judge is still on your transition team and why was he there since his history is messed up? He sat on cases at the Supreme Court justice on cases he shouldn't have been because he was also a prosecutor in those cases. The Williams case, and also [unintelligible 00:14:35] mom's case. Why would you have put him on your transition team?

Larry: Gwen, thank you so much for the question. For those listeners who may not know Ron Castille was the chief prosecutor in Philly quite some time ago, I guess about 25 years ago. He then rose to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he heard some cases and there were some issues. The United States Supreme Court eventually decided that he should not be sitting wearing the hat of a judge in judgment on cases where he played any significant role personally.

As a consequence of that, some of the decisions that were made with his help on the Supreme Court have been overturned and they have to be heard over again, but as for your question of why he was on the transition team, he was on the transition team because I wanted many, many different voices. We had people who had an adamantly different voice on the transition team at the same time. It was my feeling when I was elected with frankly more votes than any prosecutor in the last 20 years, basically, an unknown and an outsider to politics, that it was important to allow everyone's voice even if it was a voice with which I might not agree.

He was on that. Now, the transition team does not exist anymore. It is the thing that exists for a few months after you are elected and before you take office. I know that he participated as did probably a hundred, 110 other people in different capacities, but that is why. It's because we wanted every voice. You should know that there were also people who are very critical of Mr. Castille and had very strong opinions about some cases where he disagreed who participated in that team.

Brian: Sharon in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Larry Krasner, Philadelphia DA. Hi, Sharon.

Sharon: Hi, thank you for taking my call. Mr. Kramer I would like to ask you-

Brian: Krasner.

Sharon: -how you are going to cope with the youth crime in Philly. My son is a teacher there and has lost 10 kids in the past year. Two of those in the past couple of weeks and my emotion as a parent to feel that I cannot let my kid go out on the street for fear that he's going to get shot is so overwhelming. I live within the safety of New York and I understand what you're saying.

A lot of the programs that-- My son says in the schools, there's workshops in the basements, but they're not used. They need money to get these kids off the street. Some of these kids are focused on getting a career and so on, and they're shot down as in the process. Somehow this really bad epidemic needs to be addressed in Philly and its young kids. It's not kids in their 30s, it's young 18, 15-year-olds. Thanks for taking my call.

Larry: Of course. Thank you for the call. I totally understand your concern for your family member, but I hope you don't feel too safe in New York because honestly, as I said, the statistics do not support the notion that this is just one city. This is happening and happening worse in most of the bigger cities in the United States than it is happening in Philadelphia. The answer is that for 30 years, Philadelphia has in many ways gone the wrong direction.

It has not invested in prevention, in ways that were meaningful. We've seen models in places like Los Angeles and also for a couple of years in Chicago before the pandemic hit, where they invest heavily in community-based organizations, they put money into education. They don't just have these empty classrooms and workshops. They don't just get rid of all their nurses and all their school counselors and all of their arts programs.

We've seen cities where this was done, and there has been a long-term and consistent decline in some of these cities and gun violence. These are not law enforcement-led programs, but they are programs that have had tremendous success even in a place like Los Angeles, which some of us think of as the land of the crips and the bloods. Well, if you can sustain gun violence reductions for more than a decade in Los Angeles with non-law enforcement-led approaches, you are doing something right now.

Within our office, our conviction rate for shootings fatal and non-fatal is almost 85%, that was in the first quarter of 2020 before the court shut, which is incredibly high. It's a rate that we have achieved without cheating, without putting people in jail who don't belong there, who are innocent, and who are going to come out 25 years later exonerated with a big fat lawsuit. We are doing the work.

That's really not an issue, but understand what the police are up against. In Philadelphia at this point, only about 15%, that's one, five percent of shootings are solved in good times. It's only about two, zero, 20% of shootings are solved. You can have an 85% conviction rate as much as you want, but when you're in a situation where the relationship between police and the community is so broken, that you cannot get witnesses, the relationship between the prosecution and the community is so broken, that you cannot get witnesses for these cases--

Brian: Let me ask you a little bit about the conviction rate because I read a criticism in the Philadelphia Enquirer, which says the conviction rate for gun crimes in the city has plunged from 63% in 2017 to 49% in 2019. Even before the pandemic, even as gun arrests were going up. Well, what is that a symptom of because obviously, that suggests something going wrong after the point of arrest on gun charges?

Larry: No. Well, first of all, that's not actually what the report is. The report they were talking about was possession of guns. It was not shootings, fatal shootings or non-fatal shootings. This was cases where the lead charge is simply the possession of a gun. Now, what has happened in that regard, which we have studied at length because there is a decline in the convictions, is that police are, yes, they are "taking a lot of guns off the street" as they say, but they are not able to bring cases that are provable in many circumstances.

One of the things that happened in Philly is they shifted from illegal stop and frisk, meaning a whole lot of pedestrian stops where people had a gun in the belt on occasion, most of the time they had nothing, but every now and then they'd have a gun in the belt. For a prosecutor, that's easy to prove that the person possessing the gun knew it was there and intended to use it, which is what the law requires.

Now, what they're doing is a lot of car stops. Frankly, they have replaced in some places illegal stop and frisk with driving while Black. When you stop a car and if you find a gun in that car, very often, it is in the trunk. It's under the spare tire, it's under a seat, and there are five people in the car and none of them owns it because it's owned by the mother of the kid in the back seat. Yes, you got a gun, but you do not have a provable case of whose gun it is or who intended to exercise control unless you get more.

That has been a part of the problem and we have worked very diligently with the police on five separate measures that at this point have us in a much better place. The rate at which these cases are actually being hauled over for court, in other words, headed for a trial is up around 85% to 96% over the last four or five weeks, but it took a lot of work to take us from a situation where police rather than giving provable cases were basically just harvesting guns.

Brian: We have about three minutes left I want to ask you two more things. A listener on Twitter writes, "Will a not guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial set a precedent and define his actions as acceptable by the police force," making what the writer calls police murders like this legally acceptable and untouchable by any attempts at reform?

Larry: Police accountability is something I addressed my whole career. I was not just a criminal defense attorney, I was actually a civil rights attorney who filed lawsuits against police for brutality, for racism, for framing people. These are issues I've been very, very close to a long time. I represented the wives of police officers who got into divorce proceedings with their husbands and then their husbands, the police officers arrested them, charged them with crimes for no good reason, and tried to use that as leverage to get child custody, to get the house, to drive down alimony, to drive down child support.

I know that sounds insane. I represented one woman in that position first, and of course, the charges were bogus, we eliminated them and then sued. Then, I represented a second woman in the same position and I realized that this is actually in the culture. It's not just the truly atrocious cases like Derek Chauvin, it is this complete vacuum of accountability that allows for something like Derek Chauvin remaining on the job until he could do this to George Floyd.

It would be a grievous injustice if we saw an acquittal in this case and I say that as a trial attorney who was in court four to five days a week, tried a hell of a lot of trials. If that video does not do it for a jury, then we have a real problem. I will tell you that I am cautiously optimistic though. I think that the video itself is so compelling and so overwhelming that we do have a good chance of a conviction, hopefully, on all the charges, but at least on some of the charges.

Brian: Last question. Will you endorse in the Manhattan DA's race?

Larry: That remains to be seen. Not today.

Brian: You were seen as a model for defense attorney and reformer Tiffany Cabán in the Queen's DA's race last year, if I may follow up briefly, but Melinda Katz also labeling herself as a progressive prosecutor, but probably not as much as Cabán. One, do you have any take on her record so far?

Larry: Well, let me just say this. I liked Tiffany. I was a supporter of Tiffany Cabán. I generally identify with the outsider. I generally identify with people who are maybe not beloved of the mainstream party because it is, after all, the mainstream party that was hanging around when we became the most incarcerated country in the world. Let me just say that I like Tiffany Cabán and I look forward to watching what happens in Manhattan with this race. There may be a point where we do endorse, but it's just a little early.

Brian: Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krasner. He has a new book called For the People: A Story of Justice and Power. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Larry: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure.

Brian: Brian Lehrer and WNYC. Stay with us.

 

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