District Attorney Larry Krasner is lending his support to a federal lawsuit that aims to reverse the Trump administration’s $500 million in cuts to public safety programs nationwide, including several in Philadelphia.
The DA joined more than a dozen prosecutors and other state and local government officials from around the country in signing onto an amicus legal brief filed by the Public Rights Project, a California-based civil rights organization.
Krasner said rates of violent crime are at historic lows in Philadelphia, due in part to federally funded anti-violence programs, and argued that President Donald Trump wants to see those gains reversed.
“He loves crime. He loves his own crimes, he loves his friends’ crimes, and he loves crime as an excuse for his militarism, his racism, his fascism,” Krasner said in an interview. “I’m not surprised at all that he would spend his time trying to undermine things that have been very effective and have gotten Philadelphia to the point where we have the lowest number of homicides [through] the ninth of June that we’ve had in over 50 years.”
In April the U.S. Justice Department canceled the unspent portions of $820 million in previously awarded grants for a wide variety of justice-related programs, from mental healthcare for police officers to support for victims of crime and sexual assault, leading to the lawsuit.
At the time of the cuts, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said DOJ was rescinding grants “that do not align with the administration’s priorities.” She said the agency would ensure that victim services were not impacted and that recipients could appeal if they could show victims would be directly impacted.
Kensington violence interruptors defunded
The four affected grants in Philadelphia were together worth $5.4 million when initially awarded. They include $2.3 million for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for school safety research and evaluation, which was announced in 2023 and set to cover work through 2028.
The New Kensington Community Development Corporation stands to lose $600,000 still unspent from its $1.5 million Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative grant, The Trace reported. If the cut stands, it could spell the end for NKCDC’s violence interruptor program — whose staffers work to defuse street conflicts — and programs like its Cure Violence Basketball League.
“We’ve got this cycle where we are increasing the reality of how many people are going to be involved in violent activities, and we’ve eliminated really one of the only programs that is effective at addressing that,” NKCDC executive director Bill McKinney told Billy Penn last month.
The other local grants are $1 million for a community-based crime reduction program at Village of Arts and Humanities, Inc., an arts organization in North Philly; and $600,000 for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project’s work exonerating wrongly convicted prisoners.
“This was a mistake by the administration,” said Pa. Innocence Project co-founder David Rudovsky, according to the Inquirer. “It will limit the ability of our organization to be able to exonerate innocent people.”
A redux of sanctuary sanctions
Krasner is signing on to the amicus brief as he runs for a third term on a platform that consists in part of vows to fight back against the Trump administration. The DA won the Democratic primary last month and has no Republican challenger in the November general election.
Krasner noted that the Department of Justice tried to withhold funds from Philadelphia during Trump’s first term because of its “sanctuary” policies of not cooperating fully with federal immigration enforcement. The city sued and a federal judge ruled that suspending the grants would be unconstitutional. Trump signed an executive order last month once again targeting so-called sanctuary cities.
“He tried this in his first term, or something like it, and he lost,” Krasner said. “So hopefully the courts will see the wisdom of following the rule of law instead of the rule of a wannabe dictator.”
Last year, as Trump was running for a second term, he constantly claimed urban crime was out of control, even as it was actually falling sharply, the District Attorney said. Now that he’s in office again, the president is trying to make those claims come true, Krasner argued.
“There’s nothing that Donald Trump would like more than to increase urban crime and increase urban violence,” he said. “That’s how you get a military coup. That’s how you justify calling the National Guard in. That’s how you reinforce your racist false messaging about immigrants.”
The latest of several lawsuits
The amicus brief supports a lawsuit filed last month by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit that has supported justice reform efforts in Philadelphia and other cities, along with four other organizations.
DOJ attempted to cancel unspent funds in 373 grants awarded to 221 organizations in 37 states, totaling an estimated $500 million, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. The grants support violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice system enhancements, and research and evaluation.
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have also attempted to slash billions of dollars in funding for a wide range of other grants and contracts awarded by federal agencies. They add up to $437 billion nationally, per U.S. House Democrats, including at least $280 million in Philadelphia, according to Billy Penn’s calculations.
A number of those cuts and freezes have been blocked or reversed by the courts. Gov. Josh Shapiro has filed a number of lawsuits over frozen funding, most recently last week when he asked a court to stop the U.S. Department of Agriculture from canceling a three-year, $13 million federal contract to pay local farmers to supply food banks in Philadelphia and across the state.
