Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Oh look! Another Soros-backed big city prosecutor (see also: Chicago, St. Louis, Portland, Tempe, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles) who is letting more individuals charged with crimes off the hook without prosecuting them. In this case, hundreds of people charged with illegal gun possession.
This particular prosecutor — Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — is the same guy to whom Michael Bloomberg’s sock puppets at The Trace applied a warm tongue bath earlier this year for his “lonely, radical crusade to solve America’s gun problem.” Apparently ‘failing to prosecute actual gun crimes’ and ‘doing something about gun violence’ is the same thing in The Trace’s style book.
It’s bad enough in Philly that even the city’s anti-gun mayor, Jim Kenney, publicly called Krasner out earlier this year for his failure to prosecute those charged with illegal possession. How bad is it? The number of dismissed cases has almost doubled since Krasner took office.
Before Krasner was sworn in, according to data his office posted online, , the share of illegal gun-possession cases withdrawn or dismissed never topped 29%. But it has grown in each of the last three years — from 32% in 2018, to 42% in 2019, and 48% this year, according to the latest figures published Wednesday.
Some police commanders — who have long grumbled about what they perceive as Krasner’s leniency toward gun crimes — began waging a thinly veiled campaign of criticism on social media this fall as they apprehended gun suspects.
The debate was a more public extension of an issue that has been bubbling for years. Last summer, former Police Commissioner Richard Ross suggested that gunmen were increasingly carrying illegal guns because they believed they wouldn’t be held accountable even if arrested.
Around the same time, The Inquirer analyzed hundreds of gun-possession cases before and after Krasner took office, finding that convictions had declined under Krasner — almost entirely due to withdrawals or dismissals. His office pushed back against that analysis at the time.
— Chris Palmer in As Philly gun-possession convictions decline, DA Larry Krasner cites issues with witnesses appearing in court