Philadelphia’s DA preposterously blames the country’s crime problem on Donald Trump and his followers.
Larry Krasner, the “progressive prosecutor” of Philadelphia, which seems poised to set yet another homicide record this year, told an incredulous local television host last week that the violent-crime problem in America is being driven by “MAGA states.”
Just to recap, there were 561 murders in Philadelphia last year. It was a record high, but one that probably won’t last long: The City of Brotherly Love passed the 400-murder mark for 2022 last week, with a quarter of the year left to go. The 2021 record outpaced New York City by a wide margin (the Big Apple saw 485 murders — a bad year by recent standards), even though New York City’s population is more than five times that of Philadelphia. Los Angeles, which has more than twice the population of Philadelphia, saw about a third fewer murders — L.A. had 397, a 15-year high but nowhere close to the city that has adopted Krasner’s anti-prosecution policies.
When the local host pointed out to Krasner that nearly a thousand people had been murdered in his city in just the last 20 months, the DA preposterously countered that the real crime problem in America is Donald Trump and his followers. “These states in the United States that have a rate of homicide which is 40 percent higher — are MAGA states,” Krasner claimed. “They are Trump states. I’ll say it again, the rate of homicide in Trump states as compared to Biden states, take all 50 of them, is 40 percent higher.” Not content with that, he followed up with this whopper: “Eight out of ten of the most violent cities are Trump cities. Like we’ve got to get real about this. Facts matter.”
Facts matter? The highest-crime cities in America are cities that have been run by Democrats for years. No honest, rational person denies that this is so. Krasner of all people knows that it is so. He’s just spouting nonsense and hoping to get away with it. And why not? While in some cities, such as San Francisco (which ousted Chesa Boudin in a recall election in June), they’ve had their fill of the progressive-prosecutor project, Philadelphians reelected Krasner last November by a comfortable margin despite his atrocious record and lunatic policies. A once great city became a one-party, pro-criminal city, and now, as night follows day, it’s a dying city.
It is silly, in any event, for Krasner — whose sole responsibility is Philadelphia — to talk about statewide crime. Pennsylvania has a low rate of overall crime (a category that includes petty crime), but it ranks in just the middle of the pack among states in violent crime. But so what? That statistic is irrelevant to the majority of Pennsylvania counties that see few if any murders. The state number is way higher than it should be largely because of Krasner’s city, even though Philadelphia accounts for only a little over a tenth of the state’s overall population (about 1.6 million out of 13 million).
In the magazine this summer, I reviewed Criminal (In)justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, an insightful book by the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual. His key insight is that crime is a local phenomenon. About 60 percent of U.S. counties don’t see a single murder, and many more see only one or two. By contrast, about 50 percent of murders in the country are committed in just 2 percent of the counties. Forget about states, then. It’s even a bit misleading to refer to murder and other violent crime as a city or an urban phenomenon, or as a racial phenomenon within urban areas. It is very localized — in particular neighborhoods, largely committed by recidivists, often tied to gangs.
I summarized Mangual’s argument in the review this way:
A solid majority of crime is committed in small slices of urban areas. Yes, these dystopian enclaves are overwhelmingly populated by blacks and other minorities. That, however, does not make them representative of black or minority Americans broadly. Take Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, about a third of whose residents are black. Chicago is notorious for murder — topping New York City, which has three times the population. Per 100,000 people, the overall U.S. murder rate is 5.0, while Chicago’s is a whopping 18.2. But it’s not all of Chicago. Ten identifiable communities, with just 423,000 residents, accounted for over half the murders in 2019 — a “staggering” rate of 61.7 per 100,000. By contrast, 28 Chicago communities saw either one murder or none that year. In a big city, walking a few blocks, or riding the subway less than five minutes, can be like traveling to a different planet, crime-wise.
Criminals are not just stacked in identifiable enclaves. They also have recidivism in common. Lots of it. In 2015 and 2016, for example, 90 percent of homicide arrestees in Chicago had at least one prior arrest, 50 percent at least one prior violent-crime arrest, and 40 percent a prior gun arrest. On average, a murder arrestee had twelve priors, and 20 percent of those arrested for homicide or shooting offenses had more than 20 priors. On top of that, Mangual elaborates, we must bear in mind that most crime goes unreported, and a vast amount of what’s reported goes unsolved, never resulting in arrests or incarceration.
This elucidates how utterly irresponsible Krasner’s non-enforcement policies are. Under the guise of “reform” to achieve “racial justice,” he is protecting not black and other minority communities; he is abetting individual recidivist criminals who could easily be identified by competent policing and prosecuted by an appropriately aggressive district attorney. Meantime, the communities Krasner and other progressive prosecutors pretend to be championing are the predominant victims of the crimes he won’t prosecute. In Chicago, for example, while blacks make up less a third of the population, they account for 80 percent of the homicide victims.
If these victims were being killed by MAGA enthusiasts, it would be the only story in America — the media-Democrat complex would see to that. Instead, the story is sedulously suppressed. The violent crime problem in the United States is caused by the combustible combination of progressive policies and recidivist offenders. Larry Krasner can lie about it, but he’s not fooling anyone.