The American Mind

Killing America One City At A Time

William Hillman

(8/2019) If you want to get a sense of what a lawless society looks like, go no further than Philadelphia or Baltimore. Two years ago, the city of Philadelphia elected a progressive district attorney, Larry Krasner. Progressives celebrated his victory as a path to judicial reform in Philadelphia. The city has suffered every day since he took office. And his disease is spreading to other cities.

Krasner was a defense attorney known for suing the police. He would regularly attack police on local news and in the media. Krasner became DA in a seven-way race receiving 58,000 votes in a city with a population of 1.5 million.

During his first week, Krasner fired most of the Assistant DA’s, replacing them with like-minded lawyers who passed the progressive litmus test. In the first months as DA, Krasner stopped prosecution of drug possession (including intent to sell) and prostitution. He stopped bail for low-level offenders, reduced supervision for parolees, and sought more lenient sentences for certain crimes. He would direct the Assistant DA’s to not prosecute illegal gun possessions and sales. Theft under $250 would no longer be prosecuted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer compared 310 gun cases resolved in late 2017 — before Krasner arrived— to 350 cases closed in late 2018. Krasner’s office secured a lower percentage of guilty verdicts and saw more cases tossed than the year before. The drastic drop in convictions was due mostly to more cases withdrawn by prosecutors.

Then he went to war with the cops. He publicly accused the police of being racists and corrupt, and compiled lists of police officers whose arrests his office would not prosecute. (There are corrupt police who should be removed and prosecuted but painting the entire police department with broad strokes is unfair and destructive.)

Krasner’s war on police went full scale when his office chose not to pursue the death penalty in the 2015 shooting death of Philadelphia Police Sgt. Robert Wilson III.

"Wilson, an eight-year veteran of the force, was killed on March 5, 2015 when he entered a GameStop store in North Philadelphia to buy a gift for his son's tenth birthday. The father of two was slain while protecting the store manager and other customers when the gunmen opened fire during an attempted robbery. The 30-year-old officer was shot multiple times, including fatal wounds to the head and back." --Philly Inquire, June 25th 2018.

Today the police are afraid to take action for fear of being a target of the DA. The city is on the verge of lawlessness. At night, gangs roam the street looting stores. The homicide rate is at the highest it’s been for over a decade. Every metric of crime has skyrocketed. Drug camps dot the city. Heroin addicts get their fix in front of schools, leaving their government-supplied needles in the schoolyard for children to find.

Within this void of law is a growing vigilante mentality. On July 12th an attempted car jacker was beaten to death by neighbors who, in the lack of police protection, are taking law enforcement into the own hands.

The "Black Guns Matter" movement, which started in Philadelphia, continues to grow as citizens in the most affected communities arm and train themselves.

I talked to a single mother, Daffney Jenkins, who lives in one of the most affected areas of the city where crime has spiked in the last two years. "I’m taking classes and getting a gun. The city has no interest in protecting us anymore, we have to do it ourselves. What they don’t get is when they release these criminals, it’s our neighborhoods that suffer. All the rich white liberals who are doing this live in fancy apartments with their own armed guards. They sit in their exclusive clubs, drink expensive wine congratulating each other on how progressive and morally virtuous they all are. But it’s our kids who are dying. It’s our homes being robbed. It’s our future they are destroying. There were problems with the police and there were some bad ones. Bill Clinton’s ‘three strikes you’re out rule’ destroyed our community. Something had to change. But the solution cannot be giving the criminals free range of the city. This is not helping us. We in the black community are once again the victims of Progressive social experiments."

The Progressive poison is not limited to Philadelphia. Baltimore, Dallas, Boston, to name a few now have progressive DA’s

Dallas District Attorney, John Creuzot, who ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration (i.e. stopping police from arresting minority criminals) has now introduced sweeping reforms to stop police in Dallas County from prosecuting theft of personal items worth less than $750, similar to Baltimore’s policy.

In the Boston Globe last month, Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, wrote how the Suffolk County DA, Rachael Rollins’ new policies introduced by her and other reform DAs are responsible for new threats to public safety.

In his op-ed, O’Keefe wrote, "the idea that we should exempt groups of people from having to obey the law is an insult to them and a destructive form of pandering, because it suggests that these people are lesser beings than those we expect to obey the law."

Rollins was elected Suffolk County’s Chief Prosecutor seven months ago after presenting a vision that balanced crime control with reducing rates of incarceration, which disproportionately impact young men of color.

She developed a list of 15 low-level crimes that the DA’s office would review on a case-by-case basis and would — generally — be reluctant to prosecute. The roster includes trespassing, shoplifting, larceny under $250, receiving stolen property, and drug possession with intent to distribute. Rollins said in a TV interview in January that her philosophy was that jail should be a last resort.

"Make no mistake about it: We’re ground zero in a revolution, an epochal moment that asks—without necessarily answering—big questions: What is crime? What is punishment? What makes up our social contract? Throughout the country, funded by billionaire George Soros, a new breed of District Attorney has been taking the reins of power; when former public defender Mark Gonzalez, who has the words "Not Guilty" tattooed across his chest, was elected District Attorney in 2016 in Nueces County, Texas, it was a harbinger of sweeping change. The lines in our adversarial justice system were blurring. You could see it in our D.A. race last year, when ultimate victor Larry Krasner swung the debate leftward and suddenly those running to be our chief law enforcement officer sounded like they were seeking to become our Public Defender In Chief." - Larry Platt.