Republican members of Congress came to Philadelphia Friday to bash District Attorney Larry Krasner over the city’s crime woes and give a platform to the family members of local police officers killed in the line of duty.
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew and other members of the Republican-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in a Center City federal building, the latest of four such discussions of violent crime they’ve put on in Democratic-led cities.
They invited family members of the slain officers, Sgt. James O’Connor and Temple University Sgt. Christopher Fitzgerald, to testify and criticize Krasner, and they cited a flurry of statistics, some of them misleading, as evidence of the alleged “crazy” failure of the DA and city government to safeguard public safety.
“Philadelphia’s pro-criminal policies embolden criminals, while victims failed to receive the justice they deserve,” said Jordan, the committee chair. “Krasner uses his office to crusade against what he considers ‘social injustices,’ such as bail reform and reduced sentencing. However, his policies came at the expense of victims and lost lives.”
Democratic committee members countered that crime has been falling since the highs of the pandemic, and they dismissed the hearing as a “cynical political circus,” in the words of U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon.
Legislators’ time would be better spent passing measures like red flag laws and bans on “ghost gun” kits, which Republicans have largely resisted, they said.
“Philadelphians, and all Americans, deserve a Congress that does its job and passes legislative solutions, not a Congress that spends all its time mired in political sideshows and dysfunction,” Scanlon said.
Krasner held press conferences with supporters on Thursday and again after the hearing Friday to push back against the House Committee’s claims. He called it a “simulated hearing” and said it was more about painting Democrats in a bad light ahead of the November presidential and congressional elections rather than a good faith effort to address crime.
While the DA was not invited to the hearing, some of the Republicans criticized him for not coming anyway. Krasner said he would have liked to have been invited, and did not attend because he did not think he would have been given an opportunity to address the accusations against him.
A focus on historically high crime rates
Some of the trends Republicans highlighted during the hearing would be familiar to many Philadelphia residents.
They focused on the city’s huge spike in homicides in 2021, when 562 people were killed, on prosecution and detention rates under Krasner, and on his policy of not prosecuting people for minor crimes like prostitution, marijuana possession and retail thefts worth less than $500, among other issues.
They acknowledged that the number of homicides and some other crimes have been falling sharply, down to 410 killings last year, and that homicides so far this year are 35% lower than in the same period of 2023. But they said current rates are still high by historical measures and reflect a trend that began after Krasner took office in 2018.
The legislators also sought to connect increases in crime during the pandemic to the national movement to “defund the police,” which they argued had contributed to Philly’s spike in murders.
“It was a recipe for disaster that this committee has seen repeatedly in Democrat-run cities. Soft-on-crime prosecutors, mixed with elected leadership defunding the police, lead to disastrous consequences for the citizens they took the oath to serve,” Jordan said.
He and other Republican members of the committee repeatedly said Philadelphia had defunded the police by $33 million in 2020. “That had a real impact,” Virginia Rep. Ben Cline said.
However, despite calls from Defund activists, sympathetic City Council members, and others at the time, the city never actually cut police-related spending. Then-Mayor Jim Kenney rescinded a proposed $19 million increase to the police department’s budget, and programs worth $14 million were moved to the Managing Director’s Office.
A dispute over the death penalty
Family members of the slain police officers recounted in detail the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths and sought to link them to Krasner’s policies.
O’Connor’s widow, Terri O’Connor, said the man who shot and killed her husband in 2020 had been charged for multiple crimes in the previous years, such as carrying a firearm without a license. But he remained free for various reasons, including prosecutors’ decisions not to seek jail time for parole violations and to drop a drug charge, she said.
“We have a city in shambles,” she said. “We have a district attorney who says crime is down. Well obviously if you don’t prosecute criminals, of course, it appears that way. How many second, third, fourth, and even more chances are to be given?”
When asked later about O’Connor’s comment, Krasner said she had misunderstood how crime rates are reported. The information comes from the police department and is based on the number of reported incidents, not prosecutions, he said.
Pauline and Joel Fitzgerald, who have served as police officers in Philadelphia and other cities, described the death of their son while he struggled with an armed suspect near Temple University in February 2023.
Joel Fitzgerald said the perpetrator should get the death penalty, but that Krasner — who opposes capital punishment — has declined to pursue it so far. Instead he asked them to come into the DA’s office and present reasons why the death penalty is appropriate, Fitzgerald said.
“A district attorney in any state or commonwealth in the United States should stand up for the families and the victims of violent crime, and those folks should also be the people who represent us, and not have to be lobbied to do the right thing by law,” he said.
Fitzgerald grouped Krasner with progressive district attorneys across the country who he said have “dangerous personal agendas and destroy hundreds of families” with their refusal to punish criminals.
Others who criticized Krasner at the hearing included Rep. Kevin Kiley of California and Rep. Dan Meuser, who represents part of Pennsylvania’s Coal Region. Retired Philadelphia Police Officer Nick Gerace testified for the Republicans, as did local trial lawyer George Bochetto, who worked as special prosecutor for the Pa. House Republicans who attempted to impeach Krasner.
Gerace attacked Krasner for prosecuting officers like former police inspector Joseph Bologna for alleged misconduct, and argued the DA’s hostility toward law enforcement had contributed to higher crime.
“Police officers are afraid to do their job because Krasner is looking to hang every one of them,” he said.
A call for action on solutions
Meanwhile, the Democratic members of the committee called witnesses who talked about the need for laws and programs that would prevent gun violence from happening in the first place.
Dr. Ruth Abaya, a physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, testified about the impact of gun violence on youth and the efficacy of community violence intervention programs, which typically provide counseling, health care, housing and other services to help victims escape cycles of violence.
Philadelphia is among many cities that have invested heavily in violence intervention programs in recent years, using funding from the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill and other sources.
Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, said researchers have found that half of shootings result from arguments, rather than from drug deals or other situations, and that regulating access to firearms would reduce the number of gun deaths.
The Pa. House has passed bills on universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders, and ghost guns, he said, but the Republican-led state Senate has not taken them up.
“There are multiple popular bipartisan gun safety policies to prevent a shooting before it happens, rather than more victims being created afterwards,” Garber said.
In their own remarks, the Democratic House members focused on the falling crime rates of recent years and called for Republicans to join with them in passing laws to reduce violence, rather than putting on what New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler called “pure political theater designed to fit a false narrative about Democrats.”
“Today, the majority has insisted that we go to Philadelphia, the fourth stop in a tour of cities that Republicans have selected as they tried to distract from the fact that they have no meaningful solutions to make our country safer,” said Nadler, the committee’s top Democrat. “Instead, they have repeatedly focused committee activities on vilifying immigrants, dismantling common sense gun laws, and pursuing wild conspiracy theories for which they have found no evidence.”
Republican committee members repeatedly said the DA should be prosecuting more criminals, but did not specify how they wanted to make that happen.
Asked afterward if he wanted Krasner to change his policies or to be removed from office, Jordan said, “We want less crime, and you’ve got to talk about what’s creating it.”
“And, we wanted, frankly, to give a platform to people who have been directly impacted by the crazy policies unfolding not only in Philadelphia but in cities around the country,” he said.
