Larry Krasner, who is running for reelection as the district attorney of Philadelphia, has built his career focused on criminal defense and civil rights, and has worked with organizations like ACT UP, Black Lives Matter, Reclaim Philadelphia and more. During his tenure as DA, Krasner has worked to reduce recidivism, decreased the jail population and has helped address underlying causes of criminal activity all while holding police accountable by filing more than 75 civil rights lawsuits against them. He recently sat down for a phone interview with PGN to discuss his platform. Some responses have been edited for length or clarity.
If you are reelected, what are the major goals of your next term?
The biggest goal is to continue to progress towards making the city safer and freer, both of which are happening. There are a whole lot of partners involved in making this happen, but we are part of the team, and it’s very important to me that we are able to drive crime, especially violent crime, way down, and to drive incarceration, especially incarceration for minor offenses by poor people, down. We’ve done both in sweeping ways, and we have the receipts to show for that.
As of today, we are tied for the lowest number of homicides in the last 50 years. There’s a national phenomenon of huge improvements in gun violence and public safety. It is unquestionably related to the pandemic and remediating all the harm caused by the pandemic. But what’s noteworthy in Philly is that, for four years now, we have been improving at a much higher rate, much more quickly, than the average of other major cities. Cities with over a million people on average had an 8% drop in homicides while ours dropped by 11%. The next year, the national homicide rate dropped 13%, we dropped 20% and then last year, big cities dropped in the low 20s, about 22% on average, and we dropped 35%. (While PGN could not confirm the national numbers, the Council on Criminal Justice confirmed that homicide rates have been steadily decreasing in cities across America.) Year over year, we are ahead of the wave.
And this is how at the end of 2024, we saw so much journalism about Philadelphia leading the nation in terms of big city public safety improvements, despite Philadelphia’s relative poverty and Pennsylvania’s awful gun laws. There is a long list of people who deserve credit for this improvement. A lot of them are parents, football coaches, teachers and people who run nonprofits. I think a lot of it is also some intelligent modernization of enforcement, both in the Philadelphia police department, in the DA’s office and among our federal partners. Another factor is the city consciously investing more heavily in prevention, which is absolutely necessary, and something we’ve also done with our micro grants. We’ve taken about $4 million from drug dealers and put it into small community-based organizations that are doing pro-youth, anti-crime work in parts of the city where illegal activity has already done some damage.
How do you plan to impact or uphold Philadelphia laws?
My oath is to seek justice and to uphold the Constitution, federal laws and the Philadelphia Home Rule charter. It’s not to win cases. It’s not to lose cases when it’s politically helpful to me. It ruffles a lot of feathers when you actually uphold the law when it’s not politically easy. This administration has appropriately, fairly and vigorously prosecuted law enforcement when they committed crimes while they were on duty, in homicide cases, in perjury cases, in sexual assault cases, etc. We have not hesitated to do that, and we’re also not scared of rich people. You may be aware of the fact that this DA’s office sued Elon Musk in relation to an illegal lottery. We were the only prosecutors in the United States to do it, so we are not afraid of money, power [or] political consequences. We’re just going to keep trying to do what’s right and tell the people the truth until they listen.
I think it’s very important that we focus on all fronts when it comes to crime and public safety and the quality of people’s lives, but that we do it surgically, not with some kind of blunt instrument. Suggestions that we should always go for the highest charges, that we should convict rather than divert, that we should seek the highest sentence, are all wrong. We’ve learned that lesson. It’s called having a country that’s extremely dangerous and extremely incarcerated.
This whole narrative about how we do not prosecute people who do retail theft below $500 was actually never true. That was just a talking point that the right hollered in their silo and kept repeating. We did something else, which is that we prosecuted every retail theft, but we didn’t always go for the maximum charge that we could. There’s a big difference between “I won’t prosecute at all” and “I will prosecute, but we’re going to have a measured approach.”
I also can tell you there’s been some remarkable progress with retail theft in the last two years, despite the unprecedented homelessness, unprecedented addiction, even more division between the rich and the poor and the sweeping changes in retail usage that include the entire internet being the most effective fence for stolen goods in American history. I think despite all that, it’s good news when you see that retail theft is down about eight or nine percent this year over last year. I think it’s good news when you see that there is now a funded house theft and retail theft task force, which has been around now for over a year and involves collaboration with Philadelphia police and merchants to use modern techniques to deal with it.
Today, I can tell you that eight of the 10 most prolific retail thieves in Philadelphia are locked up, and we know who the other two are. However, there has to be an individualized approach, because the truth is that 80% of retail theft defendants are first timers, or people with minimal records who are generally young, opportunistic and thrill-seeking. And yes, they are worthy of mercy. They are worthy of being accountable in ways that do not result in convictions that are going to disqualify them from housing, education and participating in the economy. We need to look at the driving force behind retail theft. If what’s driving it is an acute addiction, then putting them in prison for one to two years with no treatment is not going to cure it. Even with the prolific offenders, all of our activities should be directed at not doing it again, as opposed to warehousing them in prisons at $60,000 a year for the rest of their lives, which is not realistic, not going to happen, and it’s not even right.
What do you think is the most important aspect of being a DA?
The most important aspect, in my mind, is that you have to be willing to do what is courageous. You have to believe in individual justice, and that means, when there’s a simple narrative about a situation out there that makes people think the obvious answer is A and they’re wrong, you have to go ahead and do B.
I guess one way to say it that would appeal to old heads like me is you have to be willing to be a Profile in Courage, because we have a country that’s full of profiles of cowardice. And sadly, in Philadelphia and around the country, there’s a really long history of people becoming DA as a springboard to something else. This is not supposed to be a stepping stone for personal ambition. It’s supposed to be a very difficult job in which you’re trying to do justice all the time for people who are not yourself. So I think there has to be a level of integrity and courage and a willingness to lose elections in order to do the right thing.
What steps have you taken toward connecting both with your local community and the local LGBTQ+ community?
My history with my LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters and nonbinary siblings goes back pretty far. I graduated law school in 1987 and that was during the early horrific day of minimally treated HIV/AIDs. This early in my career, I ended up in an unusual situation where Mayor Wilson Goode appointed me to investigate a case in which police rioted against ACT UP representatives during a protest. Because of my commitment to free speech and non-violent social change, the ACT UP representatives suggested me to the mayor and put me on the committee. It was a long process that ultimately focused on police accountability, HIV/AIDS, disability rights and the LGBTQ+ community.
This led to me actually leaving the public defender’s office, because I wanted to be able to represent protesters and file civil rights suits on behalf of people who I thought were being mistreated by government power. Through my experience with ACT UP, I became the go-to lawyer for many people in the LGBTQ+ community.
My support for the community has been met with support in return. When I ran in 2017, Liberty City [LGBTQ Democratic Club] had a choice between Joe Khan — who had a lot of LGBTQ+ support — or me and I won their support based on my long history of doing pro bono work for the community.
Now, after more than seven years of being a DA, we occasionally have issues that go to the heart of hate against LGBTQ+ people. We have had some noteworthy and very disturbing murders of trans people, and we have done everything we can to make sure that there’s equal justice for the survivors and victims of that kind of stuff.
Where we have the dominant party in Washington systematically and consistently fomenting hate against LGBTQ+ people, it will be important that there are local prosecutors who are going to make sure that the law applies equally within their jurisdiction, who are not going to succumb politically, or let their ambition or their polling get ahead of what they think is right. Everybody deserves protection.
In this ever-changing political landscape, how do you intend to protect and support the LGBTQ+ community and specifically transgender rights?
Our community engagement is pretty serious, and those day-to-day decisions run the gamut. Are we going to hire trans people? Yes. Are we going to hire LGBTQ+ people? Yes. If you’ve had a unique life experience that will inform your work, we’re going to consider it a positive factor. It’s a good thing that we have insight and connections and representation from every community.
That’s just one decision. Then there are all the other decisions. For example, there was a thing in Philadelphia called Project Dawn Court, which was a diversion program for sex workers who got arrested for prostitution. But it was only available to “women,” not available to “men,” and with nothing making it explicitly available to trans people at all, even though there are trans people and men who are sex workers. We canceled it because it discriminates. (Editor’s note: the website for Project Dawn Court specifically claimed transgender and non-binary individuals as part of the populations it served.) It provides a pathway to a particular kind of justice for one group that it doesn’t provide to others experiencing the same thing. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen, and in fact, we do not prosecute sex workers for prostitution in Philadelphia. They need public health approaches to try to deal with addiction issues, mental health issues, and sexual trauma issues. Many sex workers have one or more of the above. Those are the kinds of decisions that allow a sex worker — LGBTQ+, trans or not — to report a crime against them so they’re not walking around with a target on their back.
And then, of course, there are the case-by-case decisions. We collaborate a lot more on investigations and homicides than on other cases. Are the police treating the case of a transgender person’s murder as equally important as other cases? Are our prosecutors handling it and understanding the dimensions of it? If there is a dimension of hate involved here, hate is an aggravating circumstance. Hate crimes are not just directed at the victim, they’re directed at a community, and they terrorize that community.
People are not going to judge you by grand statements if they don’t see those words being carried out on a case-by-case basis. So, it’s really important not just to show some wisdom around policy to support everybody, but it is also important that the decisions are righteous, and that people see it.
If elected, will you honor the request of Nizah Morris’ family and grant them access to all the withheld records, including 30 witness interviews, relating to Nizah Morris’ homicide that are stored at the DA’s Office?
I believe that the family should have maximum access to those documents, especially given the status of that investigation, which was stopped before I was in office. But there are several restrictions here. One of them is known as the Pennsylvania Criminal History Records Information Act, which puts legal guardrails on what can be given to non-law enforcement personnel. Years ago, we said to the advocates for Morris that if they filed motions to address this problem, to get these documents, we would not stand in the way of a judge ordering it. We cannot, as a law enforcement agency on our own, simply break the law. We need to have a judicial order to provide the witness testimony, and as I said, we would support it. But that activity has to come from advocates for Nizah Morris.
The personnel we have now on staff are better equipped to provide support even where there’s a legal complication. So I would encourage anybody who’s an advocate for Morris to reconnect with us and I would be happy to meet with them again. As much as the law permits, which requires a judge’s involvement, I am 100% in favor of maximum disclosure to the survivors and family of Morris.
Why are you the best fit for this position?
Well, I don’t know that I am the best fit. I just know that I’m a better fit than people who are running against me. I think there are probably a lot of people who are more interested in doing the job right than for self-advancement. There are probably a lot of people who believe the truth matters, integrity matters, and whose principles are deeply rooted in equality. But as we look at the two candidates, I think our record speaks for itself, both before and after I was in office. And my opponent will have to answer questions like, what happened with the Josey case, and the voters will know what to do. I just want everybody to know that so long as I’m around, I’ll do what little I can to make sure Philly remains the city of brotherly love, sisterly affection and nonbinary niceness.
For more information on Larry Krasner, visit krasnerforda.com/.
