DA Larry Krasner says Philly is ‘safer and freer’ as he seeks a third term. Will voters buy in?

This article is the second in a two-part series profiling the candidates for Philadelphia district attorney.

Larry Krasner has been district attorney during the single greatest spike in violence in Philadelphia history, and now, amid its steepest decline.

He’s drawn national attention as a progressive who expanded a unit that has secured the release of 50 people believed to be wrongfully incarcerated, charged police officers with murder and other crimes, and launched a restorative justice program. Several longtime members of Philadelphia’s Black clergy, a population often at the center of the city’s criminal justice reform movement, said Krasner is more accessible than his predecessors, and has worked to repair the at-times fractious relationship between the office and community.

As the Rev. Damone Jones, who mentors teens accused of violent crimes, sees it: Krasner is “the best DA Black Philadelphians have had in a long time.”

But over the last eight years, he’s also been a polarizing figure, drawing criticism for his handling of retail theft and illegal gun possession cases, and for his management of an office that has seen a steep decline in the number of veteran prosecutors on staff. His detractors say he has let dangerous people out on bail, and they’ve gone on to commit more crimes. He has feuded with Republicans, sitting judges, and even members of his own party — conflict driven, in part, by his brash nature.

“I’m direct,” he said. “I believe people should say true things.”

His opponent in the race says the former defense lawyer’s “soft on crime” approach has created a sense of lawlessness in the city. Harrisburg Republicans, with the cooperation of some Democrats, led a drive to impeach him, and unsuccessfully sought to remove him and strip his office of power. He’s attracted national scorn from President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk — who has vowed to target progressive DAs like Krasner with his pro-Trump America PAC.

But Krasner said he loves his job and wants to do it for another four years — motivated in part by the people who have tried to stop him.

“As my mother always said, ‘You know you’re doing something right when you angry up the devil,‘” he said.

He still has work to do, he said, but the difference between his leadership and that of previous administrations is clear: the jail population is 40% smaller that it was a decade ago, and shootings in the city are at a near record low.

“Philadelphia,” he said, “is safer and freer than it was eight years ago.”

The question for Krasner, as he campaigns for what he says could be his final term, is whether Philadelphians agree.

Krasner, 64, enters the race more confident than ever in his mission of trying to break down what he’s called a harmful style of prosecution that Philadelphia long accepted as norm. He is one of just a few progressive prosecutors still standing as those in other American cities have stepped down or been removed during pandemic-related spikes in violent crime and quality-of-life issues.

Challenging the status quo, he said, breeds opposition.

“Frankly, I’d be embarrassed if no one was opposed to what we’re doing, because that would prove we weren’t doing anything,” he said.

Krasner and his supporters say he adjusted his leadership and communication style over his second term, working harder to make friends in city government, smooth over old conflicts, and collaborate with leaders of the police department, and even its union that he often maligned. And he’s made adjustments to some of his more controversial practices, reversing a retail theft policy that automatically downgraded many cases.

Still, he remains something of a political outsider. The city’s Democratic Party snubbed him and declined to endorse him for a second time this year, despite almost always backing incumbents. He isn’t all that close to Mayor Cherelle L. Parker. He has long-standing tension with Gov. Josh Shapiro, the potential presidential candidate from his own party who as the state attorney general took a more centrist approach to criminal justice. Some of the city’s most politically connected unions want Krasner to lose, saying his policies have made the city less safe.

Many of Krasner’s detractors are lining up behind his Democratic primary opponent, former Municipal Court President Judge Patrick F. Dugan, who has framed himself as a more moderate alternative. No Republican is running, so the May 20 election is likely to be decisive.

Dugan, who as a judge has seen the work of many young prosecutors from Krasner’s office, has made the DA’s management and his relationships with other agencies a key component of his message. He says often that Krasner “doesn’t play well in the sandbox” and is too much of an ideologue.

» READ MORE: Patrick Dugan wants to cap his military and judicial career by becoming Philly’s top prosecutor. Can he win?

But Krasner’s outsider persona is what has made him popular among many in the city who have typically seen the district attorney’s office as an agency that unfairly targets poor Black and brown residents. It is a good thing, some said, that Krasner is not beholden to anyone in politics.

“We have in District Attorney Krasner’s leadership, and the DA’s office in Philadelphia, a constant as it relates to reforming,” said City Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, a minister and longtime activist with the progressive Working Families Party. “Not just prosecutions for the sake of prosecutions, but doing what is just.”

Krasner sees a third term as an opportunity to continue building an office culture that he says is driven by seeking fair and equal justice, not by a prosecutor’s ambition, politics, or willingness to “cross lines in order to win cases that should not be won.”

And he hopes to allow his colleagues and Philadelphians to get to know him better — to see him not only as the combative figure tasked with running the fourth-largest criminal justice system in the nation, but also as a husband and father who’s deeply invested in the city’s future. A man who enjoys salt-crusted burgers from a certain South Philly bar and spends hours each Saturday scouring local farmers markets, then stands at the helm of an office and does “the difficult things that seem unpopular but are the right things to do.”

Born in St. Louis, Krasner moved to the Philadelphia area when he was about 8 years old. His mother was an Evangelical Christian preacher, and his father, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a crime novelist. His dad suffered serious health issues when he was a teen, he said, and his family lived on Social Security through most of his high school years.

He’s a graduate of Conestoga High School in Chester County, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law. He spent 30 years as a criminal defense attorney specializing in civil rights, earning a reputation for representing activists and protesters of various political and social movements, and for suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times over officer misconduct.

He is married to former Common Pleas Court judge Lisa M. Rau. Together, they have two sons, and live in a three-story rowhouse in Center City. He is fluent in Spanish, enjoys cycling, and finds his “zen” in cooking, he said. He has Type 1 diabetes, and often spends hours each Saturday shopping local markets for fresh cheese, produce, and meats for a week of healthy meals.

People who recognize him on his walks often approach him with kindness. A few here and there will boo or whisper expletives. See: the chain-smoker on Juniper Street who mutters insults. But that’s what comes with being one of the most polarizing prosecutors in the nation.

His antagonistic persona was a key part of his running for district attorney in 2017. With the backing of some of the city’s most influential Black politicians, as well as George Soros, the Democratic megadonor who has boosted progressives nationally, Krasner won a seven-way race, placing himself at the vanguard of a national reformist prosecutor movement.

Krasner began his first term by firing more than 30 longtime prosecutors in an effort to cut ties with predecessors he described as corrupt. In the four years that followed, the office lost more than 250 attorneys, throwing it into what some described as a state of chaos. His young prosecutors were, at times, admonished by judges. He referred to those who fled his office to work for Shapiro, then state attorney general, as “war criminals,” and he clashed publicly with city officials, including then-Mayor Jim Kenney and former Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw over what was to blame amid a massive spike in shootings and homicides during the pandemic, during which nearly 1,500 people were killed in three years.

He also came under fire as his office’s conviction rate for gun possession cases plummeted amid historic rates of shootings. Politicians and residents questioned whether Krasner’s tactics contributed to an uptick in carjackings, robberies, and thefts.

Still, in 2021, Krasner won reelection in a landslide, despite the efforts of the police union, which supported his Democratic challenger, Carlos Vega, one of the prosecutors he’d fired.

His second term was marked by more political turmoil. In 2022, he was impeached by the state House in a Republican-led drive that drew some Democratic support. He wasn’t removed, but lawmakers later successfully stripped him of some of his prosecutorial authority by assigning a special prosecutor to handle crimes on SEPTA property.

Krasner said the political efforts to remove him are rooted in Republicans’ being “absolutely in love with crime.”

Krasner said he’s proud of his office’s efforts to reduce the city’s jail population and the number of Philadelphians serving life in prison, and believes his team has expanded its relationship with the community.

He created the office’s first restorative justice program, which allows people charged with certain crimes that do not involve guns to resolve their cases outside of the courts through monthslong conversations with their victims and the community. Only about 45 cases have been going through the program annually since it launched in 2021, though Krasner would like to see as many as 1,000.

Krasner has charged a number of police officers with crimes — from those who shot people, to homicide detectives accused of perjury and abusing witnesses.

For the first time in Philadelphia history, his attorneys last year convicted an officer of murder for an on-duty shooting. Another officer who shot and killed a man in August 2023 faces a murder trial later this year.

But that follows a host of other officers who were found not guilty, or had their cases dismissed, sometimes because of mishaps by Krasner’s staff. Some critics have said Krasner unfairly targets police, and puts too many resources into refiling charges or appealing dismissals.

And he built a database of police with records of misconduct so prosecutors are aware of potential issues before calling them as a witness. The police union challenged the practice, saying it unfairly damaged officers’ reputations, caused them professional harm and potentially lost wages. A judge sided with Krasner.

He has pivoted on some issues recently, too. He created a retail theft task force, and has abandoned a controversial 2018 policy that any thefts under $500 be charged as a summary offense, which is akin to a traffic citation.

He’s used stronger language when talking about prosecuting people who carry guns illegally — often touting his office’s unit that targets “prolific offenders” — despite contending in 2021 that a “war on guns” could usher in mass incarceration.

And he said he learned that his diversion program for juveniles arrested for car theft wasn’t intense enough after many kids reoffended.

“Sometimes the details are not right,” he said. “They have to be tweaked. But the notion was a good one.”

Others in city politics noticed.

State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, a Democrat who has long represented southwest Philadelphia, said that while Krasner can still be a “contrarian,” he has showed more openness to adjusting policy positions — including on retail theft — and is “clearly listening more intently to the concerns that people express.”

“There’s a broader swath of us who support him now,” Williams said. “It’s a broader array of political personalities than before. I think he’s done a good job expanding his relationships.”

Krasner’s sometimes curt style of communication has not always helped him build relationships with other politicians in the city — or residents. He’s working on it, he said.

“I’ve said things that I regret,” he said. “I’ve screwed up. I’ve said things that were insensitive or too easily quoted out of context.”

Case in point: When, as Philadelphians were being shot at an unprecedented rate, he said: “We don’t have a crisis of crime.”

Over the last year, Krasner has appeared more interested in making amends with elected officials. He said he hasn’t really changed — it’s as if, now that crime is down in the city, officials are more interested in his ideas. He sees that as “a positive, normal evolution of a relationship.”

“The job trains you a bit about how to interact,” he said.

State Rep. Rick Krajewski, a West Philadelphia progressive who was an early Krasner supporter, said he and Krasner went through a similar evolution from activist to politician.

“Here’s someone who operated as an attorney, a team of one, now being a manager and being an elected in a system of other electeds,” Krajewski said. “I think he’s had to learn how to employ diplomacy and the relationships needed to be successful.”

He’s also got more allies of his political ilk. State Rep. Ben Waxman, who formerly served as Krasner’s spokesperson and now represents parts of Center City in Harrisburg, pointed out that a wave of progressives, like Krajewski, were elected after Krasner.

“The reason he’s doing better politically and why he gets stronger and stronger,” Waxman said, “is because there are more and more people like him that are now a part of Philadelphia politics.”

If reelected, Krasner would be only the second Philadelphia district attorney in nearly 100 years to serve more than two terms. The other was Lynne Abraham, the tough-on-crime Democrat who served in the 1990s and was once dubbed the “deadliest DA” because of how frequently she sought the death penalty.

For Krasner to win a third term, Krajewski said, would symbolize how dramatically attitudes in Philadelphia have changed since then.

“The truth is that our city is still wrestling with these questions about, what is the future of our criminal-legal system, and what does fair justice mean?” he said. “But I have faith that our city is bought into Larry’s vision and wants to continue to support that vision.”

On a recent Saturday, Krasner sipped coffee on Ninth Street in the Italian Market, where a mural once loomed of Mayor Frank Rizzo, whose legacy was one of at-times brutal policing. He recalled shopping in the market decades ago, and seeing butchers turn away a Black patron. Now, it’s brimming with immigrant-owned businesses and a diverse slate of shoppers.

He sees a similar future for the city’s criminal justice system. Through March, Philadelphia had recorded one of the lowest homicide rates in its history. After peaking during his first term, violent crime has dropped markedly, and fewer people are being shot than they were a decade ago.

Krasner believes his work as DA has played a role in that — despite all of the efforts to stop it.

“They ignore you, they laugh at you, they fight you, and then you win,” he said.