How dare left-wing prosecutors insist their policies are 'working' while a murder surge disproportionately slaughters black Americans, seethes HEATHER MAC DONALD in searing analysis of the carnage

• e-mail

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of 'The War on Cops'

Considering the unprecedented murder surge in America's cities over the last two years, one might expect progressive district attorneys to reconsider the policies that have kept criminals out of jails and on the streets.

Think again.

Last week, Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner told a local television news anchor he's not prepared to change course.

'It is working,' Krasner claimed, a few days after another mass shooting had killed a 14-year-old football player and wounded four of his teammates following a high school scrimmage.

The anchor noted incredulously that a thousand people had been killed in Philadelphia over 20 months.

'It is working,' insisted Krasner.

Krasner apparently defines a policy as 'working' when it contributes to the highest number of murders and the highest murder rate in a city's history, a record number of carjackings, the routine looting of stores, and savage beatings of innocent pedestrians.

Krasner has a knack for denying the undeniable.

'It is working,' Krasner (left) claimed, a few days after another mass shooting had killed a 14-year-old football player and wounded four of his teammates following a high school scrimmage.

In 2020, he made a similar 'everything is going great' claim.

'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 said in a December press conference, when Philadelphia's homicide count was its highest since 1960 despite the city's 20% smaller population.

Krasner's 2020 'no crisis' assertion triggered an acid response from former Philly mayor, Michael Nutter.

'I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney,' Nutter remarked.

For once, a 'white privilege' accusation was justified.

Every time a left-wing prosecutor claims his policies are working, every time members of the mainstream media scoff at the idea that crime is out of control, they are essentially saying that black lives don't matter.

It is black people who have borne the brunt of the recent crime surge.

In 2020, as anti-cop hatred swept the country following the death of George Floyd, an additional 3,400 black people were killed by gun homicide in 2020 compared to 2019, according to CDC data.

The rate at which blacks died of criminal shootings increased 39.5 % from 2019 to 2020.

Why don't their lives matter?

Black males between the ages of 10-24 died of shootings at 21.6 times the rate of white males in that age range in 2020; for males between the ages of 25 and 44, the black-white difference in the gun victimization rate was 16.7.

In Philadelphia, blacks are at least 85% of homicide victims, though they are 41% of the population.

Krasner apparently defines a policy as 'working' when it contributes to the highest number of murders and the highest murder rate in a city's history, a record number of carjackings, the routine looting of stores, and savage beatings of innocent pedestrians.

Krasner's 2020 'no crisis' assertion triggered an acid response from former Philly mayor Michael Nutter (above). 'I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney'

In the first nine months of 2022, someone was shot, lethally or non-lethally, in Philadelphia every five hours; that rate accelerated between Memorial Day and Labor Day to produce a shooting victim every three hours.

Those victims were overwhelmingly black.

If five to eight whites were being shot a day in the City of Brotherly Love, there would have been an uprising.

And what's more, this carnage was predictable.

Krasner came into office in 2018 pledging to dismantle alleged systemic racism in law enforcement.

For progressive prosecutors, police chiefs and judges, fighting supposed criminal justice racism means not enforcing the law, since any color-blind, constitutional law enforcement inevitably has a disparate impact on black criminals -- not because the law is racist, but because the black crime rate is so disproportionately high.

Accordingly, Krasner stopped prosecuting a host of offenses, including retail theft under $500, drug possession, and a range of illegal gun possession cases.

In 2022, 66% of violent felony arrests made by the Philadelphia police went nowhere, almost all withdrawn by Krasner's office; 49% of illegal gun possession cases were likewise sent down the memory hole.

Criminals got the message: Crime has few consequences.

Philadelphia's decriminalization approach (which began in 2015 but which Krasner vastly intensified) resulted in 74 additional homicides a year, according to former federal prosecutor Thomas Hogan.

Now the pushback is gathering steam.

Relatives of homicide victims have been testifying before a Pennsylvania House committee that seeks Krasner's impeachment.

'I am here because of the lawlessness that continues to plague the city,' said Nakisha Billa last week.

Billa's 21-year-old son was fatally gunned down in 2021.

'This is not a political stance. This is a stance from a mother whose whole world has been turned upside down,' Billa told the committee.

Indeed, Billa supported Krasner's decriminalization policies until she saw the results.

So how can Krasner claim his policies are working?

Because for the left, diverting minorities from jail and prison is an end in itself, a way to strike a blow against 'mass incarceration.' And Krasner acknowledges no connection between his policies and Philadelphia's crime woes.

There is 'absolutely no correlation between [a prosecutor's] being progressive or traditional and the rate of crime,' he insisted during his TV interview last week.

Eight out of 10 of the most violent cities are 'Trump cities' Krasner said. 'We got to get real about this. Facts matter.'

Facts do matter, and Krasner's facts are as wrong as his policies.

The 10 most violent US cities in 2019, the latest best available data, were Democratic strongholds: from St. Louis and Baltimore, in slots one and two, to Memphis and Cleveland, in slots nine and 10.

Among US cities with a population of a quarter million or more, the first 19 with the highest homicide rate in 2018 were run by Democrats; Republican-led Tulsa came in at slot 20.

A minimum of 12 major cities broke their homicide records in 2021—among them Philadelphia, Portland, Austin, Baton Rouge, Rochester, NY, and St. Paul. All have Democratic mayors.

Krasner claimed during his interview that the homicide rate in 2020 was 40% higher in 'Trump states' than in 'Biden states,' an assertion presumably based on a study by the left-wing think tank Third Way.

State homicide rates are not particularly revealing about crime policies, however. Crime and policing are intensely local matters, with wide variations across different geographical areas; no resident wondering about whether to move to a particular city looks up the state crime average.

The Third Way study made much of Mississippi, which the organization ranked number one in per capita murder rates. But the Mississippi average was driven by Jackson, a city run since 2017 by self-described socialist Chokwe Antar Lumumba.

Upon election, Lumamba pledged to make Jackson the 'most radical city on the planet.'

In 2020, Jackson's homicide rate reached its highest point in its history. Jackson beat that record in 2021, with a jaw-dropping rate of 100 homicide victims per 100,000 population. By comparison, St. Louis's homicide rate in 2019 was 64.54 murders per 100,000 population.

Decriminalization policies in other cities, whether New Orleans, Chicago, or New York, coupled with Democrats' rhetorical war on cops, are producing similar results.

Short of rebuilding the inner-city family, the only certain means for lowering crime are arrests, prosecution, and incarceration. Ideally, society could prevent criminals from reoffending while keeping them outside of the criminal justice system. But the record of social service diversion programs is dismal.

The delegitimating of law enforcement after the death of George Floyd in May 2020 has emboldened criminals and demoralized cops across the country.

Its effects have been bloodiest, however, in left-wing jurisdictions like Krasner's that have decided that lowering prison counts is per se a form of racial justice, regardless of how many black lives are lost.

Krasner's policies are not 'working,' and to pretend, as the Left does, that crime is a racist fiction, or a 'dog whistle' conjured up by white supremacists, treats those lost black lives as meaningless.