Larry Krasner is a highly atypical district attorney. For one thing, before he became Philadelphia’s top prosecutor, he’d never prosecuted a criminal case. Instead, he made his name as a defense attorney, representing activists from Black Lives Matter and Occupy and filing civil rights lawsuits against the Philadelphia Police Department — 75 times.
So when Krasner ran for Philadelphia DA last year, his victory seemed highly unlikely: Philadelphia has the highest per capita incarceration rate among the 10 biggest cities in the U.S., and a deep-rooted, tough-on-crime culture has permeated the justice system for generations.
When Krasner ran on reversing decades of mass incarceration, his campaign drew scorn, and then fear, from the criminal justice establishment. The president of the local police union initially called his candidacy “hilarious,” and a group of former prosecutors penned a letter calling him a “radical candidate” who was “dangerous to the city.”
Nevertheless, Krasner trounced his opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election, drawing many more voters than any DA’s race in recent memory. His was the most stunning in a recent series of victories for a national criminal justice reform movement focused on dismantling mass incarceration at the local level.
Now Krasner faces the unique challenges of an agitator who finds himself suddenly at the instruments of power. So far, he’s succeeded in shaking things up: He revealed that his predecessor kept a secret list of bad cops who weren’t allowed to testify in court; he’s stopped pursuing low-level marijuana possession cases; and he’s stopped charging cash bail for most minor offenses.
But there are bound to be obstacles in his way. When asked whether he expected resistance to his project from people within the system he’s trying to transform, Krasner said, “I think there will be resistance. I don’t worry about it. Because the fact is, these are the people who got us here. We have not always suffered from mass incarceration — it has been the accumulation of their decisions and their power over the last 30 years that caused this problem.”
This segment originally aired March 14, 2018 on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
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