There is an astonishing exodus afoot from the office of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, one of the prosecutors who took office on criminal reform platforms in recent years. Krasner has been criticized for his denial of any crime wave in the city despite other Democratic leaders complaining of the rising lawlessness (culminating this week with the carjacking of Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon at gunpoint ). The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Krasner’s office has lost 261 attorneys out of a staff of 340, including 70 prosecutors hired under his tenure. The office is described as in disarray with largely young, recent law school graduates carrying out the priorities and policies of Krasner.
Krasner drew criticism even from Democrats this month when he held a press conference to declare “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.” He later walked back those comments:
There has been a similar massive overhaul in other offices of other Soros-backed prosecutors, including over 50 prosecutors who resigned or were fired under San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Mayor London Breed recently called for a crackdown on crime but Boudin joined other leaders to denounce that effort for more policing as potentially abusive and counterproductive.
For those of us who have long argued for new approaches to crime prevention, including greater youth programs, these prosecutors are hurting rather than helping the cause. George Soros seems to be funding the most extreme figures for local prosecution offices. There is a need for alternatives to incarceration but there is also a need for deterrence in policing and prosecution. We have seen the removal of the threat of arrest for crimes like shoplifting and the result predictably has been a sharp rise of such crimes in cities like San Francisco. The cause and effect seems obvious.
These prosecutors and extreme advocacy groups are undermining the effort to craft creative but realistic criminal reforms. Indeed, we have seen politicians who defunded or reduced police departments express regret that they really did not think through the implications of their actions. Other cities like Seattle and Portland are rushing to refund police after defunding police. The problem is that prosecutors like Boudin are opposed to ramped up prosecutions that would accompany ramped up arrests. The result can be increased feeding of cases into a system that then scuttles or abandons actual prosecutions.
That appears the problem in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports over the past year 73% of the 21,000 cases the office has handled were withdrawn by prosecutors or dismissed by a judge. That is a massive increase given the 36% of cases that were withdrawn or dismissed in 2017 before his election. It is like a fire brigade passing buckets to put out a blaze only to have the last guy pour the water on the ground rather than the fire. Deterrence depends on both the threat of arrest and prosecution.
Hmmm. I thought the whole Soros conspiracy was just that, or so the left has been trying to tell me. Looks like another conspiracy theory panning out.
There is real reform that was necescary in policing, law enforcement and prosecution.
But the left has thrown the baby out with the bath water.
The likely net effect is going to be a backlash against all reform – that probably will do little more than slow the increase in crime we have seen recently, and will make the problems that needed fixed worse.
We are already seeing democrats like Breed back pedal. We should not forget that some of the toughest war or drugs and crime bills ever passed – were lead by Joe Biden.
It is very easy for democrats to pivot from soft on crime to crime warriors.
Unfortunately that does little to solve the real problems that we have – both with law enforcement and crime.
Being the incarceration nation with 5% of the world-s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated has made us infamous. Other countries laugh at us yet we feel compelled to throw people away instead of digging into the root causes of behaviors.
How are the opinions of other “countries” relevant?
So, you want to play the broad brush statistics game? Well, 50% of the violent crime in the US is committed by 6.5% of the population (guess). And in CA, 30% of those incarcerated in state prison are not even US citizens. Only 40% of homicide cases are ever cleared. You are viewing the world through rose colored glasses, lady. If anything, the US has an underincarceration problem.
Lawrwnce, I believe your statistics. I would like to send to friends but not before I can cite sources. Can you shed light?
No kidding. Soros is a thug, plain and simple. I’d say it’s great that he’s so old, but he has groomed his children to pick up right where he left off.
Yep, I need all new conspiracies, because all my old ones, have come true! Also, Idiocracy is now become a documentary!
“Beer For My Horses”
Well a man come on the 6 o’clock news
Said somebody’s been shot, somebody’s been abused
Somebody blew up a building, somebody stole a car
Somebody got away, somebody didn’t get too far yeah
They didn’t get too far
Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree,
Round up all them bad boys hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
Too much corruption, and crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ’em all to their maker and he’ll settle ’em down
You can bet he’ll set ’em down
That justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses
– Toby Keith
Krasner is Soros spelled backwards. (And don’t call me an anti-Semite! I always thought Soros was a person of some kind of eastern European heritage until the lefties made a big deal of his family, not he, having been Jews. I have no idea about Krasner’s religion, except that he worships at the feet of lefties, so-called progressives, American Marxists, Soro-ites, etc.)
They’re both Jews, whether religious or not.
An alternative to incarceration for certain crimes…..Caning. It works in Singapore.
Just what we should expect from a person with authoritarian and brutish impulses.
She’s a Philly Buster.
This is what you get from the now dominant Soros-Democrat Party, Hell on earth.
Democrats are masters of lying with words. They have no intent to “reform” criminal justice … they only know how to destroy criminal justice and support criminals over citizens. Their actions have proven they have no understanding of how to manage a city, run an economy, protect the populace, or operate in the international sphere. Democrats have ruined our cities and harmed so many young people who live in the cities. Now they are intent on ruining the US and by extension the rest of the globe.
If you voted for them you voted for incompetence and ignorance.
Well said!
As much as I detest the likes of Krasner … parading as a District Attorney … I blame each and every FOOLish voter who put him in that job. Of course, I also lay blame on Soros!!
From the post
For those of us who have long argued for new approaches to crime prevention, including greater youth programs, these prosecutors are hurting rather than helping the cause.
Mankind evolves. Culture shape shifts. Change is the only constant.
Without defining the problem, solutions are nothing but a self serving guess
Brian Wilson in comments gets to the problem, but did not mention the cause.
The Federal Government. FDR and “The New Deal” tore down the fences of Federalism. Most people have heard of FDR’s threats of court packing. But what motivated the President to mess with a system in place for more than 125 years? Depression era SCOTUS kept declaring his agenda worked outside the enumerated powers of the Federal Govt.
Sadly, FDR’s threats were enough for the court to weaken, and start to find ways the Federal Govt could in fact work outside the Fences of the Constitution.
That was bad enough, but then comes LBJ. With the nation in the throws of another crisis, the assassination of a sitting President, LBJ launches the “Great Society” programs. For the good of the nation? That was the public narrative, but the truth, Democrats planned that massive redistrubution of wealth into the pockets of the lower wage earners would entrench Democrat elected officials, for at least a generation.
That’s the set up.
The result.
The Federal Government supplanting the family as this nations basic foundational structure. The federal govt took over the role of Mother Father, Grand Parents and cousings/ provider/protector. But as with all thing govt, time proves it to be a massive failure. Why the huge number of single head of household families? Uncle Sam is there to hand out money, all you have to do is agree to the subsistence existence promised by the govt. Families, we don’t need families, Just wait for a Democrat and crisis and more money will be handed out with the same invisible strings and people will continue to be fooled by the promises of Democrats
In the meantime children are raised without adequit parenting, street gangs filling the vacuum created by govt subsidies.
Welcome to Democrat’s vision of America.
Brian Wilson in comments gets to the problem, but did not mention the cause.
Brian indeed ascribed the cause itself of our decaying culture. While Democrats, starting with FDR and more so LBJ, have contributed to our cultural decay with welfare, each individual has a responsibility to practice self-regulation (self-control) and evolve to something better, productive, efficacious. Work, exercise, moderation in nutrition, evolving in personal maturity, etc are all tools to achieve the latter
The physician-writer, Dr Lewis Thomas, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s that were published in the book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. It was prescient. Today’s technology allows us to look at the cells, as Dr Thomas did with less technology at the time, within our bodies and observe how they are industrious to an extreme. Within these 30 trillion cells that we all have, there is no room for waste, sloth, inactivity, inefficiency, acquiescing, quitting. Literally, at the cellular level, if a protein, a molecule, a receptor, a signal does not work, it is eliminated (termed apoptosis). No ifs, ands or buts. The protein is degraded by enzymes. Dont work? Poof, youre gone.
In multicellular organisms, cells that are no longer needed or are a threat to the organism are destroyed by a tightly regulated cell suicide process known as programmed cell death, or apoptosis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26873/
We exist today as humans because our cells are efficient laborers who have no regard for inefficient constituent members. Christianity (not Judaism, not Islam) has inculcated within our nation to care for the other, i.e. government welfare. However, when the minority of individuals who are disabled, widowed, orphaned, fallen on hard times, have become the majority, entropy ensues. We are there now IMHO. See the Civilian labor force participation rate
Most of us have to be industrious, productive, be efficient and self-regulate so that we can take care of ourselves (natural selection / survival of the fittest) and take care of those around us (according to Christian teachings). If most of us are slothful, lazy, maladjusted, inefficient, consumers, a burden, and unscrupulous, needing outside intervention to survive, we collapse as a society.
We should learn from our cells: do the task for which you are genetically programmed, or face extermination.
“…be efficient and self-regulate so that we can take care of ourselves (natural selection / survival of the fittest)”
estovir, you clearly do not understand natural selection nor biological evolution. You have co-opted a scientific idea and deployed it to support a thoroughly incorrect social idea that goes by the name of social Darwinism, a misapplication of the name and idea of Darwinism.
“You have co-opted a scientific idea and deployed it to support a thoroughly incorrect social idea that goes by the name of social Darwinism . . .”
Well said.
That deterministic theory treats man as if he were merely an animal, pushed blindly by instincts beyond his control — an animal without a mind, free will, independently chosen values.
Man is merely an animal. Do you think man is a plant, or a fungus?
No, what he wrote is in no way similar to social Darwinism. Do some reading sometime.
Can you imagine a foreigner preparing to visit the United States? What city could they visit and not need to bring tactical gear? Who would vacation is our once amazing cities? Should the tourist be issued a Glock and a pooper scooper?
Soros has a larger plan. What is it? What is his ultimate purpose? It is obvious what the short term result have yielded. What used to be hundred thousand dollar DA races are now a million or even more. He pours millions into one campaign.
A smart campaigner would hang this squarely on Soros and the Marxists, hard left communist-socialists who are afoot with the goal of tearing down this nation. The facts are there. They now have an army of mindless, radicalized followers who can be summoned on social media to cause hell. These fit the legal and FBI definition of terrorists. Does not the “build back” require destruction?
Terrorism to what end? What will be their price for ransom? Is this why they detest with a passion free speech and the right of citizens to defend themselves?
Someone needs to find Soros’ compound and invite a bunch of drug-addled street shitters to camp out there!
“Soros has a larger plan. What is it? What is his ultimate purpose?”
To create lawlessness, chaos, and fear — which are then used as a pretext for a dictatorship. He has always been a power-luster, with a visceral hatred of American independence and individual freedom. Every tyrant needs a financier. And that’s Soros.
I am sure he has structured things to go on after he dies. But now he is at the jumping off place of his mortal life.
Indeed, we have seen politicians who defunded or reduces police departments express regret that they really did not think through the implications of their actions.
This should be a required watermark on any published document, webpage, Twitter post, ad campaign, etc. on behalf of anyone in the Democratic party. These people think like teenagers, but with the force of government behind them.
If you want to solve the crime problem, look to solving the underlying social pathologies driving it: 70% single parent birthrate among blacks, 30% among whites for starters. 60% of black children grow up with no father in the home. With no healthy role model, they turn to the streets for their role models. The failure of five decades of Socialist Democrat programs to alleviate these problems is the dark secret no civil rights “leader” or Democrat politician wants to see the light of day.
As for the law profession look to our law schools – particularly our top tier ones who have embraced woke philosophy. Their view of hardened criminals as “underpriviledged” is as much naive as it is deadly. One would think that highly educated law grads would look to experts in criminology to understand the kind of predators they are dealing with. Let me recommend they read the books and writings of Dr Robert Hare – author of the diagnostic checklist for criminal psychopathy.
Brian – Crime should be punished – but a lot of laws should be overturned too. E.G. civil forfeiture laws lead to police stops on suspicions of drugs possession. Make drugs legal and a lot of violence, thefts, and robberies would stop. Traffic stops because of minor civil infractions often end in violence. Problem is the old saying
of police: “If there’s no crime, we’ll create one.”
Unless legal drugs are free, users still will have to buy them, which means crime won’t go down.
In those places that have merely decriminalized drug posession- voilent crime has dropped – often significantly.
Police, and prosecutors are obligated to enforce the laws we have – whether those laws are good or bad.
The “policy” choices these DA’s are making – belong to the people through their legislatures – not police or DA’s.
I agree with Bill McWilliams that we have too many bad laws, and that eliminating those will solve many of our problems.
Legalizing drugs does not solve all the problems with drugs and drug addiction.
But it DOES reduce violent crime.
At the same time it is NOT the prosecutors job to decide what laws should and should not be enforced.
“. . . which means crime won’t go down.”
Then you prosecute the crime, e.g., robbery, theft. You don’t ban the thing that motivated the crime, e.g., drugs, jewelry, money, food, et al.
What definitely does “go down” is a significant source of funding for the crime syndicates. Prohibition always enriches those syndicates.
When you have a PROSECUTOR that doesn’t prosecute it makes no difference how many police you have on the street. Sure there may be some added safety to having criminals arrested, but they know the system and if they are not prosecuted they will not be deterred.
Second point: Soros and his merry band of criminal coddling DAs will see the ground shift under them now that their (usually) hidden agendas are out in the open and are doing serious damage to the DEMOCRATS. Last year the media and the left all supported the riots as they damaged Trump by making it look as though the country was out of control, but once they went too far and the riots started hurting the Democrats there was a call, even by the likes of one Don Lemon, to cease and desist.
Crime is an issue that is hurting the Democrats and that is why you see fools and liars like London Breed and Newsome calling for order. Next comes the media and Psaki telling us that there is no crime and if there is then the Democrats are the police party. But the bottom line is that since it is hurting the agenda we will see an attempt at a crackdown. The problem for the Dems is that moonbats like Krasner, Boudin and Gascon will not bend.
PS. Boston’s Suffok County elected one of the Soros lunatic DA, one Rachel Rollins, and how did she fare…Biden nominated her to be the State’s Attorney and so she got a promotion. Of course once she was passed by the senate clips of her insanity emerged and now senators like Maggie Hassan in NH have to try to deal with it.
A serial parking-lot rage offender. The first I’ve ever heard of.
Actions without consequences