Tag: elected official

The Brutal Things Republican Voters Say About Mike Pence

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Mike Pence is making little secret of his presidential ambitions. He’s written his book, he’s assembling his team, he’s mastered the art of the coy non-denial when somebody asks (in between trips to Iowa) if he’s running. In early Republican-primary polls, he hovers between 6 and 7 percent—not top-tier numbers, but respectable enough. He seems to think he has at least an outside shot at winning the Republican nomination.

And yet, ask a Republican voter about the former vice president, and you’re likely to hear some of the most withering commentary you’ve ever encountered about a politician.

In recent weeks, I was invited to sit in on a series of focus groups conducted over Zoom. Organized by the political consultant Sarah Longwell, the groups consisted of Republican voters who supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The participants were all over the country—suburban Atlanta, rural Illinois, San Diego—and they varied in their current opinions of Trump. In some cases, Longwell filtered for voters who should be in Pence’s target demographic. One group consisted entirely of two-time Trump voters who didn’t want him to run again; another was made up of conservative evangelicals, who might presumably appreciate Pence’s roots in the religious right.

I’ve been covering Pence’s strange Trump-era arc since 2017, when I first profiled him for The Atlantic. By some accounts, he’s wanted to be president since his college-fraternity days. I’ve always been skeptical of his chances, but now that he finally seems ready to run, I wanted to understand the appeal of his prospective candidacy. My goal was to see if I could find at least one Pence supporter.

From the January/February 2018 issue: God’s plan for Mike Pence

Instead, these were some of the quotes I jotted down.

“I don’t care for him … He’s just middle-of-the-road to me. If there was someone halfway better, I wouldn’t vote for him.”

“He has alienated every Republican and Democrat … It’s over. It’s retirement time.”

“He’s only gonna get the vote from his family, and I’m not even sure if they like him.”

“He just needs to go away.”

It went on and on like that across four different focus groups. Of the 34 Republicans who participated, I only heard four people say they’d consider Pence for president—and two of them immediately started talking themselves out of it after indicating interest.

Some of the reasons for Pence’s lack of support were intuitive. Hard-core Trump fans said they were alienated by Pence’s refusal to block the certification of the 2020 electoral votes, as the president was demanding. This break with Trump famously prompted chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” to echo through the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Although the sentiment expressed in the focus groups wasn’t quite so violent, the anger was still present. During one session, three people—all of whom had reported “very favorable” views of Trump—took turns trashing Pence for what they saw as his weakness.

“I’m so mad at Pence that I would never vote for him,” said one man named Matt. “He would be a horrible president … I just don’t think he has the leadership qualities to be president.” (I agreed to quote the participants only by their first name.)

“That’s exactly it,” a woman named Christine said, nodding eagerly. “He didn’t have the leadership qualities to do what everyone wanted him to do on January 6. He just doesn’t have that spine.”

A third participant, Nicholas, chimed in: “He just chose to go along with all the other RINOs and Democrats, not to upset the applecart.”

Meanwhile, less MAGA-inclined Republicans thought Pence was too Trumpy.

“The only thing I liked about him was that he actually did stand up to Donald Trump,” a woman named Barbara said. “He’s too a part of Trump. I don’t think Trump has a chance, and I don’t think anybody in that inner circle has a chance either.”

“I think he put a stain on himself for any normal Republican when he joined the Trump administration,” said another participant, Justin. “And then he put a stain on himself with any Trump Republican on January 6. So I don’t think he has a constituency anywhere. I don’t know if anyone would vote for him.”

Read: Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking

Longwell told me this is how Pence is talked about in every focus group she holds. What to make of that 6 to 7 percent he gets in the primary polls? “I imagine there’s a cohort of GOP voters who are not particularly engaged who don’t want Trump again, and Pence is the only other name they really know,” she speculated. That, or “they’re all from Indiana,” the state where Pence served as governor. A second Republican pollster, who requested anonymity to offer his candid view, told me, “Seven percent is a weak showing for the immediate former VP.”

Devin O’Malley, an adviser to Pence, responded to a request for comment in an email: “Mike Pence has spent the last two years traveling to more than 30 states, campaigning for dozens of candidates, and listening to potential voters. Those interactions have been incredibly positive and encouraging, and we place more value in those experiences than of a focus group conducted by disgruntled former Republicans like Sarah Longwell and paid for by some shadow organization that The Atlantic won’t disclose.” (Longwell told me the costs for the focus groups are split between The Bulwark and the Republican Accountability Project, two anti-Trump organizations with which she is affiliated.)

What I found most fascinating about the voters’ digs at Pence was that they were almost always preceded by passing praise of his personal character: He was a “top-of-the-line guy,” a “nice man,” a “super kind, honest, decent” person. Not only did these perceived qualities fail to make him an appealing candidate, but they were also often held against him—treated as evidence that he lacked a certain presidential mettle.

“I don’t like how Trump was just in your face with everything, but Pence is almost too far in the other direction,” one participant named Judith said.

Perhaps these voters were identifying a simple lack of charisma. But their casual dismissal of Pence’s wholesome, God-fearing, family-man persona is emblematic of a sea change in conservative politics—and a massive miscalculation by Pence himself.

When Pence was added to the ticket in 2016, his chief function was to vouch for Trump with mainstream Republicans, especially conservative Christian voters. Pence’s reputation as a devout evangelical gave him a certain moral credibility when he defended Trump amid scandal and outrage. He performed this task exceptionally well. Those adoring eyes, those fawning tributes, that slightly weird fixation on the breadth of his boss’s shoulders—nobody was better at playing the loyalist. And for a certain kind of voter, Pence’s loyalty provided assurance that Trump was worthy of continued support.

Pence had his own motives, as I reported in my profile. All of this vouching for Trump was supposed to buy Pence goodwill with the base and set him up for a future presidential run. For many in Pence’s camp, the project took on a religious dimension. “If you’re Mike Pence, and you believe what he believes, you know God had a plan,” Ralph Reed, an evangelical power broker, told me back then.

But in creating a permission structure for voters to excuse Trump’s defective character and flouting of religious values, Pence was unwittingly making himself irrelevant. In effect, he spent four years convincing conservative Christian voters that the very thing he had to offer them didn’t matter.

In 2011, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” By 2020, that number had risen to 68 percent.

Peter Wehner: The moral desolation of the GOP

Pence won the argument. Now he’s reaping the whirlwind.

In one of the focus groups, a devout Christian named Angie was asked how much she factored in moral rectitude when assessing a presidential candidate. “I try to use my faith to choose someone by character, but it hasn’t always been possible,” she said. Sometimes she had to vote for a candidate who shared her politics but didn’t live her values.

“Who comes to mind?” the moderator asked.

“I think Trump falls into that category,” Angie conceded. “But quite honestly, the vast majority of others do as well.” She paused. “I would say Pence actually doesn’t fall into that category. I would say his character probably aligns with biblical values fairly well.”

But Angie remained uninterested in seeing Pence in the Oval Office. If he had a record to run on, she wasn’t aware of it.

“Anything he did got overshadowed by all the drama of these last four years,” she said, hastening to add, “Seems like a perfectly nice man.”

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McKay Coppins

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March 21, 2023
C. J. Rice’s Narrow Path to Freedom

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Last week, The Atlantic published its November cover story, “Good Luck, Mr. Rice,” in which Jake Tapper investigates the case of a Philadelphia teenager who was convicted of attempted murder after a 2011 shooting that left four injured. C. J. Rice, now 28, has maintained his innocence. No physical evidence tied him (or anyone) to the crime, and the single eyewitness who identified him as the perpetrator had told police three times that she did not recognize the shooter before ultimately changing her story. Rice’s pediatrician, who happened to be Tapper’s father, Theodore, contends that his involvement would have been physically impossible—Rice himself had been seriously injured in a separate shooting three weeks earlier.

A skilled lawyer would have emphasized these holes in the state’s case. But Rice’s court-appointed attorney, Sandjai Weaver, was not up to the task of zealously defending her client. Overworked and underpaid, she failed to prepare alibi witnesses, challenge the credibility of the eyewitness’s testimony, or even introduce his medical records as evidence. “Rice lacked legal representation worthy of the name,” Tapper argues. “And as he has discovered, the law provides little recourse for those undermined by a lawyer. The constitutional ‘right to counsel’ has become an empty guarantee.”

Rice first appealed his conviction in 2013. At the time, an older man gave him what he calls an “athar,” a prison adage imparted from inmate to inmate (athar may derive from the Arabic athara, meaning “transmit” or “pass along”). The appeals process, the man said, was like a boxing match: Each time you get knocked down, it will be harder to get back up. If Rice wanted his freedom, he would have to shake off the disappointments, drag himself to his feet, and keep fighting.

That initial appeal, and another challenging Weaver’s competency, have since failed. Rice has struggled, at times, to rouse himself after a defeat. But in each of the letters we’ve exchanged, he’s assured me that he’s “just taking things one day at a time.” It’s a difficult coping strategy for someone facing 30–60 years in prison.

His appeals exhausted, obtaining a commutation from the governor is likely Rice’s only path to freedom. (In Pennsylvania, those currently incarcerated must have their sentence commuted before seeking a pardon.) Commutation is a complicated and lengthy process. Unlike his counterparts in many other states, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf cannot commute sentences unilaterally. The state constitution prevents the governor from acting without the approval of a five-member Board of Pardons, composed of the lieutenant governor and attorney general as well as a medical expert, corrections expert, and victim representative. The petition process requires painstaking attention to detail—one man I spoke with said his petition was rejected because of a single mistyped date—and great patience. It usually takes about three and a half years to unfold.

On Friday, Rice and a team of lawyers at an organization called the Reform Alliance began that process, sending a petition for commutation to the Board of Pardons. The success or failure of Rice’s petition will depend on the underlying facts of his case, but also on the members of the board and the political pressures they face.

Though the board was created in the 19th century to forestall favor granting and horse trading, the process has hardly been insulated from politics. Two of the current board members, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, are in the final weeks of competitive campaigns for elections that are of national significance—Fetterman in a race that could determine control of the U.S. Senate, Shapiro in a race against a gubernatorial candidate who denies the results of the 2020 election. For Fetterman, past votes in support of commutation applications have proved to be potent attack-ad fodder for his opponent, the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Shapiro’s opponent, as well, has cast him as soft on crime, linking rising rates of certain crimes to Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general. Both Fetterman and Shapiro declined to comment on Rice’s case, claiming they were hesitant to weigh in on an application that could come under their review.

Rice’s petition is unlikely to be reviewed before November’s elections, however, after which the composition of the board will shift. Voters will decide the political futures of Fetterman and Shapiro and whether the two men will pay a price for their choices as board members. The candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general will undoubtedly be watching. The lessons they learn from the experiences of their predecessors will shape the outcome of Rice’s last attempt to secure his freedom.

A commutation petition requires a detailed account of the applicant’s personal and criminal history. When the board receives an application, it solicits supplemental materials and feedback from the department of corrections as well as the district attorney and president judge for the county where the crime occurred. It then votes on whether to allow an applicant’s case to proceed. If the applicant wins the requisite number of votes—a simple majority in C.J.’s case—they receive an interview with the board and a public hearing. Afterward, the board votes again: If an applicant wins the support of enough members, the board recommends their case to the governor. Only at that stage can the governor decide to issue a commutation.

Though the creation of the board was intended to make the clemency process less subjective, its members lack a definitive set of factors for determining whether to recommend an applicant. Its mandate, former board members told me, is simply to “show mercy.”

I reached out to former board members to ask about how they would view a case like Rice’s. John Wetzel, who served as Pennsylvania secretary of corrections and sat on the board as its “corrections expert” from 2007 to 2011, expressed disbelief at the facts of Rice’s case. “I’ve been working 32 years inside corrections,” Wetzel said. “There are still moments that shock you.”

Members of the board serving in elected positions may share Wetzel’s view, but their calculus is complicated by the realities of Pennsylvania politics. The positions that Fetterman and Shapiro currently hold are common launchpads for higher office; over the past century, more than a quarter of Pennsylvania governors have at one time served as either lieutenant governor or attorney general.

Decisions made while serving on the Board of Pardons can come back to haunt an elected official. In 1992, a man named Reginald McFadden, who had been convicted of murder at age 16, petitioned the board to have his sentence commuted. Having received enthusiastic recommendations from his prison warden, the secretary of corrections, and the judge who had ordered his sentence, the Board of Pardons, then chaired by Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel, voted 4–1 to recommend McFadden’s commutation to then-Governor Bob Casey Sr. McFadden was released from prison in 1994.

That year, Singel was running as the Democratic candidate to succeed Casey as governor. A month out from Election Day, he maintained an eight-point lead over his Republican opponent, Tom Ridge. Then, on October 6, less than three months after his release, McFadden was arrested in New York and later convicted of the murder of two Long Island residents and the rape of a third.

The arrest turned the governor’s race upside down. Ridge went on the offensive, characterizing Singel as soft on crime. Ridge ultimately won the gubernatorial race by nearly 200,000 votes.

In 1997, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a constitutional amendment that required a unanimous vote of the Board of Pardons for the governor to commute a life sentence or the death penalty. Between his election in 1994 and the end of his term, Ridge did not commute a single prisoner’s life sentence.

For members of the Board of Pardons with political ambitions, the lessons of the Reginald McFadden case were clear. One wrong vote could sink an entire career.

After the 1997 constitutional amendment, commutation for those with life sentences became virtually impossible to obtain. From its passage through 2018, the board has been able to muster unanimous votes for only 12 life-without-parole applicants. At least eight others would have qualified for a recommendation under the old rules; the amendment functionally condemned each of them to die in prison. Commutations for people like C. J. Rice, serving long sentences for violent crimes, have been nearly as hard to secure.

As lieutenant governor, John Fetterman has prioritized revitalizing the clemency process. Fetterman made criminal-justice reform a central tenet of his 2018 campaign and has sought to redefine the Board of Pardons as a final fail-safe in cases where courts have declined to act.

In April 2019, Fetterman appointed Brandon Flood as the board’s secretary. Flood had himself been incarcerated and successfully applied for a pardon. He brought to the role a litany of ideas for reforming the process. Facing a backlog of cases from the ’90s and early aughts, he wanted to impose a minimum eligibility requirement to ensure that the board focused its efforts on those who had served the most time; he pushed to clear administrative red tape and reduce and remove filing fees. The fear of recidivism that dominated the board in the shadow of the McFadden case was unmerited, he argued. According to a study Flood helped commission as secretary, of the 3,037 pardon applicants in the state of Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2018, only two were convicted again of a violent crime.

Together, Fetterman and Flood dramatically increased the number of applicants that the board recommended to Governor Tom Wolf. Wolf, for his part, tended to follow the board’s recommendations, issuing more than 100 pardons each year of his term. In 2020, he granted 551. (A spokesperson for Wolf said that “the governor has made criminal justice reform a top priority throughout his administration” but declined to address Rice’s specific case.)

Fetterman was especially passionate about the case of Lee and Dennis Horton, two brothers convicted of second-degree felony murder in 1994. The Hortons were identified by an eyewitness in a “show-up” procedure that is now commonly regarded as likely to induce bias—similar to the way an eyewitness later identified C. J. Rice. Their clemency application failed when Shapiro voted against it. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fetterman then met with Shapiro and threatened to run against him in the 2022 Democratic gubernatorial primary unless he changed his vote on theirs and other applications. The brothers got a new hearing, and Shapiro voted to recommend them for commutation. When they were released from prison, Fetterman hired them as field organizers for his campaign. (Fetterman declined to comment to the Inquirer on private conversations with Shapiro. A spokesperson for Shapiro denied that the encounter ever happened and said Shapiro’s votes had nothing to do with politics.)

Once Fetterman’s term on the board expires, the reforms that he and Flood enacted may prove fleeting. “There’s a lot of stuff you can do administratively or that you can do through executive order, but it’s not durable policy,” Flood, who resigned from the board in 2021, told me last week. “After you leave in January, whoever the next person is can say, ‘I don’t like this shit,’ roll it back, and that’s it.”

The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, Carrie DelRosso, has been mum on what she would do as pardon-board chair, telling the Delaware Valley Journal that she is “very pro–law enforcement” and would “listen to the experts.” Though she and Doug Mastriano, the party’s nominee for governor, diverge on many issues—candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run on separate tickets in Pennsylvania primaries, and Mastriano had endorsed a less moderate candidate for lieutenant governor—neither has much of an incentive to continue Fetterman’s reforms if elected.

The Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Austin Davis, has also been vague. Asked whether he would use the lieutenant governor’s office “as a bully pulpit for criminal justice reform and clemency,” as Fetterman has, Davis told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star that he is “very concerned that Pennsylvania communities are safe.” “I believe there isn’t an and-or situation when it comes to safety and the work of the Board of Pardons,” he said.

Flood told me he’s met with both lieutenant-governor candidates about the pardons board. Neither DelRosso nor Austin knew much about how the executive-clemency process worked, he said, but they were willing to learn.

Still, even if the next lieutenant governor were to fully share Fetterman’s sympathies, they may be hesitant to replicate his approach to the board, having seen its effects in his own campaign for Senate.

Recently, Mehmet Oz’s campaign reportedly paid actors to dress in prison jumpsuits and carry signs that read Inmates for Fetterman. Seizing on his hiring of the Hortons, the campaign has demanded that Fetterman “fire the convicted murderers on his staff.”

Accurate or not, Oz’s attacks appear to be resonating: Though Fetterman once maintained a healthy lead, polls have tightened in recent weeks, leaving the outcome of the Senate race unclear.

For now, Rice remains at State Correctional Institution–Coal Township. As his case proceeds, he’ll sit in his cell and try to remember his fellow inmate’s athar. “I’m not bitter,” he told me in March. “I see what that does to people in here, people who are locked up for stuff that they didn’t do.” He sighed. “People really lose their mind in this place.”

Rice has little choice but to wait out the results of the 2022 election from the prison and watch as two newly elected politicians fill Shapiro and Fetterman’s vacated seats on the Board of Pardons. Ultimately, his fate will be decided by that board, by the political pressures that shape its decisions, and by how its members evaluate who deserves mercy.

The Reginald McFadden case still casts a shadow over Pennsylvania’s pardon process. So long as an elected lieutenant governor and attorney general serve on the board, so long as their positions launch careers in higher office, the board’s actions will be circumscribed by fears of making a similar mistake

In 2017, former Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel reflected on his decision to recommend McFadden for commutation in an essay published by America, a Jesuit monthly. “As much as I regret that fateful decision, I cannot accept the alternative: a government and a society that looks with cold indifference at those who have turned their lives around and who languish in our overcrowded prisons,” he wrote. “For me, mercy and compassion are more than personal options,” Singel continued. “They are the underpinnings of what can make America not only great but good.”

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Andrew Aoyama

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October 19, 2022
What Does the Philadelphia D.A. Do Now?

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Larry Krasner has been at the forefront of the progressive-prosecutor movement since becoming Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017. Which means that he has also been at the center of an unending storm.

Krasner has faced relentless battles with the police union, other local elected officials, and Republicans who control the Pennsylvania state legislature and are now making an unprecedented effort to impeach him. He’s also won support from many community leaders and criminal-justice-reform advocates. On Wednesday he reached a milestone: His office won a manslaughter conviction against a Philadelphia police officer for shooting a Black man in 2017—the first such conviction for on-duty action in Philadelphia in at least half a century.

Darcy Covert: The false hope of the progressive-prosecutor movement

Yet, like other progressive prosecutors in major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to San Francisco, his political position remains precarious. These prosecutors received a huge burst of momentum from the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And they have an aggressive agenda aimed at reducing jail and prison populations, elevating alternatives to incarceration (particularly for juvenile offenders), emphasizing community services over tough enforcement to reduce gun violence, and imposing greater accountability for police-officer misconduct. (Beyond Wednesday’s conviction, Krasner is pursuing murder cases against two other police officers; previously no murder case involving a Philadelphia police officer had gone to trial in almost 40 years, The Philadelphia Inquirer found.)

But rising crime rates have weakened these prosecutors’ standing. Though violent crime, particularly homicides, remains far below its peak, in the 1990s, the rates in many major cities spiked at the height of the pandemic to levels far above the totals earlier in this century—and have remained stubbornly high since. As of Monday, Philadelphia, for instance, has experienced 388 homicides this year, slightly more than in 2021 and double the number through that date as recently as 2015.

Criminologists say the causes of these increases are complex. And crime rates often rise faster in places committed to traditional hard-line policing and prosecutorial policies, as the centrist Democratic group Third Way showed in an eye-opening report earlier this year. (The murder rate in red counties outside Pittsburgh grew much faster than Philadelphia’s did from 2019 through 2021, Krasner’s office pointed out to me.) Krasner and his allies in Philadelphia cite the Republican-controlled legislature’s repeated rejection of stronger gun laws, such as red-flag statutes and universal background checks, as a key cause of the city’s endemic gun violence.

Yet none of this has insulated progressive prosecutors from an intensifying backlash. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled earlier this year; like-minded Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón narrowly avoided a recall election because opponents bungled their petition-gathering effort.

Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin

The decision by the Pennsylvania General Assembly to explore impeaching Krasner marks the latest challenge to the movement. Last week the chamber voted to hold Krasner in contempt when he refused to provide documents it demanded as part of the probe. Krasner, for his part, has filed suit in state court arguing that the legislature lacks the authority to remove him, primarily because its impeachment power, under the state constitution, is limited to state officials, not local ones.

Craig Green, a law professor at Temple University, told me he thinks Krasner is likely to win that argument. The General Assembly, Green says, has “never tried anything” like this possible impeachment before, even in cases where local officials were guilty of gross misconduct and corruption, which no one has alleged against Krasner. Craig is dubious that the state supreme court will conclude that the legislature’s disapproval of Krasner’s policy choices meets the standard of “improper or corrupt motive” the court has set as justifiable grounds for a potential impeachment.

Even if Krasner doesn’t win in court, Republicans don’t have enough votes in the State Senate to reach the two-thirds majority they would need to remove him should the House impeach him. But the controversy over his approach isn’t going anywhere, either, particularly as Philadelphia struggles with the wave of gun violence that has spilled out from long impoverished neighborhoods on the north and west sides into its rejuvenated Center City. More than 1,700 people have been shot in the city this year, police statistics show.

Yesterday at The Atlantic Festival, I sat down with Krasner to discuss his battles with the state legislature, his diagnosis for the rising crime rate, and his continued commitment to rethinking how the criminal-justice system operates. Below are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Ronald Brownstein: Mr. District Attorney, you have been in the center of the storm since your election in 2017. And you’ve certainly got one brewing now with the Republican-controlled General Assembly in Pennsylvania trying to impeach you. Why is this happening, and where is it going?

Larry Krasner: It’s happening because progressive prosecutors keep winning elections. There is a misperception that we’re losing; that’s actually incorrect. They can’t beat us in elections, so they try to remove us from office in other ways: by recalls, by impeachment. In my situation, what occurred is, for the first time in the history of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the legislature is trying to remove an elected official for their policies. I repeat: policies. You can get removed for crimes or deeply corrupt activity. That’s what impeachment is for. But you’re not supposed to be removed because your policy won by a landslide.

Brownstein: Can they remove, in your view, a local official as opposed to a statewide official?

Krasner: No, in my view, they can only remove statewide officials, because there is a separate impeachment procedure for cities. And I happen to be in a city.

David A. Graham: How criminal-justice reform fell apart

Brownstein: Well, the policy dispute is obviously about your approach and what is happening with crime in Philadelphia. And [according to] the police department, there have been 388 homicides in Philadelphia. That was the figure through Monday. We are still not back up to the levels of crime that we saw in the 1990s, but we are at an elevated rate from earlier in the century, not only in Philadelphia but in many other cities. What’s driving this?

Krasner: Well, there’s been an uptick really since 2014 in Philadelphia. That’s more or less the low point nationally. I think a lot of things are driving this. But the main thing I bring up is guns. There are more and more and more guns every year. And if you look at the number of guns that are actually removed from the street by law enforcement, they are at least doubled or tripled by the new legal gun sales that are occurring. We have seen an accumulation of guns in this country at this point where we have one and a half guns per human being, more or less. And we have an NRA that would like to see a loaded gun tucked into a diaper. This is an NRA that would like silencers, which hasn’t happened since the 1930s. They would like us to be able to print our guns at home on 3-D printers. [It’s] the most damaging organization to public safety in the history of the United States.

Brownstein: Let me ask you about guns, because that is certainly one of the flash points in the debate about your approach in Philadelphia. It’s also been a flash point in L.A., where I live: what to do with people who are caught with guns but haven’t used them yet in a crime. Your view, as quoted recently in The New York Times, is that it’s counterproductive to focus on arresting and incarcerating people caught carrying firearms without legal permit. Why do you think that?

Krasner: So that view is not correct. It’s counterproductive to prioritize that more than solving gun violence. The reality is that if you want to stop gun violence, you should pursue gun violence. That means you should solve homicides. You should solve shootings. The current solve rate, or at least the most recent measured solve rate for gun homicides in Philly, is 28 percent. The most recent solve rate for shootings in Philly is 17 percent. Our conviction rate for homicides is approaching 90 percent; better than our predecessors, but we only get the cases [police officers] solve.

So a lot of what has happened all across the country is coming from [fraternal-order-of-police] sources, right-wing sources: that the real problem is guns; it’s not the homicides. And the reason they’re saying that is they’re having terrible difficulty solving the homicides. I do not say that, by the way, to besmirch the police. There are certain tools that they need. There are modern ways to actually solve these cases, including some absolutely unbelievable forensics that would blow your mind. But you’ve got to invest in them.

Brownstein: You had a landmark conviction of a police officer this week, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But I want to just be clear: What is your view about what should happen to people who are found with guns who have not yet committed a crime? Are you saying that they should in fact be prosecuted on a routine basis?

Krasner: Yes, they should. And the fact is that the House itself, before they decided to impeach me, did a study and found that the sentences for gun possession were longest in Philadelphia. Just so we understand what’s really happening here. This is not coming from some real concern about crime. Our city is giving out longer sentences, including under my administration. So that’s a total red herring.

Brownstein: Many of the other progressive prosecutors have talked about treating gun violence as a public-health problem. Again, the statistics as of Monday: 1,700 shooting victims. In Philadelphia, what have you learned about the opportunities and limits of a public-health strategy to combat gun violence? Do you feel like it’s stemming the tide with those kinds of numbers?

Krasner: I’ve learned we haven’t tried it. This is a country that has not used public health to try to deal with addiction. We have not used public health to deal with mental illness and homelessness. We haven’t used public health to deal with criminal justice. Even though we do have reform going on in ways that are constructive, all of the money that’s being saved, which is an enormous amount of money, is not going back into rebuilding the mental-health system that was torn down about 85 percent during the period of mass incarceration. All that money is not going into public schools. And in Philadelphia, public-school kids are funded at half the level of the surrounding counties. But that’s another enormous problem. If we don’t take the money that we’re saving from doing stupid and put it into smart, then all we’re doing is building another tax break for wealthy people, and there is going to be some level of failing to succeed as much as we could.

Brownstein: So give me your wish list to reduce those 1,700 shootings.

Krasner: On the enforcement side, the biggest thing that we should be doing is investing very, very heavily in modern forensics. You can do absolutely amazing things with cellphones that we could not do before. You can do amazing things right now with tiny bits of DNA. You can do amazing things that would solve an enormous number of cases. And until we do that, the notion of deterrence is really not there.

I don’t know why we are allowing anybody to have an AR-15. I don’t know why we’re allowing [young] people … to get them. I don’t know why we have gun shows at all. I don’t know why we have unregistered gun parts. I mean, the whole notion of a polymer gun or a ghost gun is that it’s a loophole. You can get an unmarked piece of plastic and a bunch of unmarked pieces of metal that you can buy on the internet. You can put them together in your basement and you can sell an arsenal round out the back door. And we see more and more ghost guns that are showing up at crime scenes, and it’s doubling and tripling and quadrupling every year.

Read: The real reason America doesn’t have gun control

Brownstein: Some of the prosecutors elected as part of this movement have opposed cash bail, sometimes in all cases. But you have taken a different approach, a more nuanced approach. You support high cash bail in cases of gun violence.

Krasner: There’s a general misunderstanding of what “no cash bail” is. No cash bail has happened in D.C. for over 30 years. There’s only two stops on this train. One stop is you get out without having to pay money. You may have to go to a place that provides homeless services or mental-health services or addiction services, because whatever they’re sending you to is associated with your interaction with police. And those are nonviolent offenses, for the most part. But then there’s the other group who sit in jail, no matter how rich they are.

But the problem in Pennsylvania is you’ve got a legislature that likes its bail-bonds people, makes a lot of money in donations off of their lobbyists, and they are in love with cash bail. What we did in Philly is we tried to simulate a no-cash-bail system by asking for very high bail, which is a million or more in some cases. And then no bail; we don’t ask for these $10,000 bail, $50,000 bail amounts, because they just make things worse.

Brownstein: You won a landmark conviction of a police officer for an on-duty shooting, a manslaughter conviction—the first one, I believe, in at least 50 years. You have several more in the pipeline. What is the message you are sending with these cases?

Krasner: The message is what it always should have been, which is that justice applies to everybody. We probably cleared 150 or 200 shootings toward or of civilians by police in uniform. But we have charged three officers with homicide so far. And I mean, to me, this is not complicated. If you commit a murder, if you shoot an unarmed person in the back and you don’t have a lawful justification, the fact that you’re in uniform doesn’t excuse that.

[There are] a lot of really great cops in Philly. They just have a rotten leadership of their union. But there are a lot of really good cops in Philadelphia who are trying to do it the right way. And every time we knock down a corrupt police officer or a vicious, brutal police officer, we’re just lifting up the good ones, which also hasn’t been done in forever.

Brownstein: There’s a sense that this [progressive-prosecutor] movement is on the defensive now, as you noted, with the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the attempted recall of Gascón, the fight that you are facing in Pennsylvania. Is it possible to maintain support for alternative approaches that focus less on incarceration while crime is going up?

Krasner: The way to get it under control is criminal-justice reform, because doing things in a just way actually does make us safer. And I know that sounds like a platitude. But let me just give you an example of why I think they’re really at our throats.

So, 10 years ago, there were essentially zero progressive prosecutors and no portion of the U.S. population lived in a jurisdiction with a progressive prosecutor. Two and a half years ago, 10 percent of the U.S. population [did]. Right now it’s about 20 percent; 70, 75 million Americans have elected or reelected a progressive prosecutor. They all want to talk all day about Chesa Boudin and his recall, all that. They want to talk about that. Who here knows that we have a new district attorney in Memphis who is a progressive and replaced a very conservative incumbent? Who here knows that in Alameda County, right across from San Francisco, Pamela Price is about to win and win big? And she lost four years ago. It is not the case that progressive prosecution is dead in action. The real case here is that even in this incredibly difficult time, it’s maintaining. I wouldn’t say it’s growing, you know, doubling in leaps and bounds like it did around the events surrounding George Floyd. But it is maintaining. So the reality is we’re doing really well, and they can’t beat us in elections, and they’re worried about that.

The truth is, conservatives don’t actually care very much about crime. They really don’t. What they’re really worried about is that criminal-justice reform is something that connects to voters who are unlikely voters who are alienated from the system, who finally are seeing some reason to go to the polls, which is why we had insane turnouts in our off-year, low-turnout elections both times I ran. And we’ve seen this in many other jurisdictions. If I am a MAGA Republican, the last thing I want to see is any progressive prosecutor still standing. Because what it could be is the salvation of democracy. And they are out to destroy democracy.

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Ronald Brownstein

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September 23, 2022