District Attorney Larry Krasner and retired Municipal Court judge Patrick Dugan took potshots and made insinuations about each other at an election forum in Center City Thursday night while seeming to largely agree on the priorities and policies the DA’s office should pursue.
The two men will face each other in the May 20 Democratic primary that will likely decide who serves as the city’s top prosecutor for the next four years, since there will be no Republican candidate in the November general election. Krasner is seeking a third term after winning reelection by a wide margin in 2021.
Dugan acknowledged that he’s a long shot to win, saying he’s currently 40 points behind in the race. But he insisted that many residents blame Krasner for persistent retail thefts, shootings and other crimes, giving the judge a chance at an upset victory if they show up at the polls.
“It’s a silent majority. People are fed up. People are fed up in Center City. They’re fed up in Northwest, they’re fed up throughout the city because they are not safer. They don’t feel safer. They don’t sit on their steps feeling safe,” he said after the forum concluded.
Krasner meanwhile suggested that electing Dugan would represent a retreat from his office’s efforts over the past seven years to expose alleged past misconduct by prosecutors and police and to overturn unjust convictions. He pointed to the judge’s 2013 decision to acquit a police officer of punching an unarmed woman.
“We cannot afford to have another DA who is driven by ambition, who is willing to do more than they should and cross lines in order to win cases that should not be won, whose decisions on a case, for example involving a police officer, are driven by politics,” he said in his closing remarks.
Dugan said at the time that he acquitted the officer because a viral video of the punch didn’t show the context in which the incident occurred, and he cited the officer’s testimony that he struck the woman by accident.
The forum was held at String Theory School on Vine Street and was sponsored by the school, the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association and the Philadelphia Sunday Sun. The candidates took questions from Sun publisher Catherine Hicks and Committee of Seventy president and CEO Lauren Cristella.
Crime up, crime down
The discussion centered in part on the complex question of crime rates in Philadelphia during Krasner’s tenure. They soared to historic levels during the pandemic but recently have sharply declined in most categories, with homicides currently trending to the second lowest annual rate in at least 50 years, according to the DA.
Dugan’s campaign passed out copies of a Police Department chart that showed retail thefts more than doubled from 2020 to 2024 while the number of arrests remained low. Dugan criticized Krasner’s former policy of prosecuting many thefts of less than $500 as summary offenses, similar to a traffic ticket, rather than as misdemeanors. One of the DA’s stated goals was to reduce the number of people held in jail while awaiting trial.
“Wawas, CVS, Home Depots and corner stores have had thousands of incidents a month in their stores. You can’t sustain a business,” Dugan said. “Why are we letting these people come in and just take? When you’re standing in Best Buy and a guy walks out with a TV, how do you feel about that? Shouldn’t we hold those people accountable? We haven’t, and then the stats are right here.”
The former judge likened the policy change, which Krasner ended last year, to President Donald Trump’s efforts to unilaterally restructure the federal government. “It’s his policy, again, an executive order, because the law says this isn’t what it should be,” Dugan said. “Who else does executive orders? Who is a one-man legislature, who is the other guy that does this?”
Krasner accused Dugan of spreading “false narratives” about retail theft and other issues. He said his office had never stopped prosecuting retail theft and noted that conviction of a summary offense could still lead to a short jail term.
Some Wawas in Center City have closed because of poor sales, not crime, he said, and retail thefts have started declining this year, in part due to the work of a retail theft task force he started with the police department last year. He suggested thefts have been driven by broad societal trends that have led to spikes in homelessness and drug use.
“We got to talk about what’s real here, not talk about a bunch of shenanigans in politics around what’s really going on. This has been a favorite talking point of some people, but that don’t make it true,” he said. “They should also be talking about the fact that we had more homeless people in the United States last year than any prior year, [and] about the fact that we have a massive opioid addiction problem that the U.S. government has failed to remedy.”
Criticism of DA hiring practices
Dugan criticized the way Krasner has run the DA’s office, saying he recruits young attorneys from prominent law schools around the country rather than hiring locals who already know the city, and sends new staffers to court with insufficient training. Their inexperience has at times led to majorities of cases being withdrawn, he argued.
“Some of them really mean well, but some of them just have no clue what they’re doing, and they’re getting beat up every single day by defense counsel,” he said. “As a judge, I can only do so much, and I was so frustrated that we’re just leaving them hanging out to dry. You know who else is being left there hanging out to dry? You, the victims.”
The retired judge cited reports of high attrition rates early in Krasner’s tenure, saying that one class of 78 new DAs had seen 68 departures.
Krasner has acknowledged the problems in the past, and he said at the forum that his office now does longer and more extensive trainings of new hires than his predecessors did.
He said he recruits around the country in part to improve the office’s diversity, which he said was poor before he became DA, and said Dugan should be helping the new lawyers rather than “maligning” them. Cases are withdrawn or dismissed for various reasons, such as defendants being sent to diversion programs or witnesses not showing up in court, not necessarily because of flawed prosecution, he said.
Dugan said he would make sure senior district attorneys are mentoring new hires, and cited his experience as President Judge overseeing the Municipal Court and maintaining “pretty darn good morale” among its 300-plus employees.
Who plays better in the sandbox?
The judge argued that voters should also support him because he would cooperate more with the police and other departments on crime-fighting strategies. In meetings he used to attend with multiple city leaders, Krasner was typically the one dissenter when the group would seek agreement, he said.
“It’s got to be his way or no way, and that was our DA. The mayor and the police commissioner are part of the reason why the strategies are starting to work with some of the crime rates going down. I know they’re not going to come out publicly and say this, but there’s no cooperation that much … with the District Attorney’s office,” he said.
He said Krasner had recently been “dragged and pulled, screaming” to cooperate more “because it’s an election year.”
Krasner rejected the claims as “layers of inaccuracy,” and said he works well with Mayor Cherelle Parker and Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel.
Dugan suggested he would focus more on putting violent criminals behind bars. He pointed to a 2018 case in which the DA’s office was criticized for downgrading charges against a man who shot a shop owner with an AK-47 assault rifle during a robbery. After saying an assistant DA had mishandled the case, the DA’s office attempted to vacate the gunman’s plea. The man later pleaded guilty to federal charges.
The former judge’s other plans if elected include assigning district attorneys to each police district so they can keep residents informed about progress on prosecuting crimes that occurred in their neighborhood. He said that kind of communication used to happen routinely but was discontinued under Krasner.
The two candidates were largely on the same page on many of the issues they were asked about, such as the importance of rehabilitating juvenile offenders, the right to peaceful protest, and cracking down on illegal ATV and dirtbike riders.
When asked about the Trump administration, Krasner said he would prosecute any Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who breaks the law, while Dugan said there wasn’t much the DA could do to stop ICE and it was up to citizens to protest and push back.
Nazi tattoos and the United Nations
A few times during the hour-and-half-long forum, Krasner suggested that Dugan was insufficiently focused on diversity and racial equity, for example during their back-and-forth about which schools the DA’s office visits to recruit new lawyers.
“If your point is we shouldn’t go to any historically Black college and university law schools, then you’re making your point,” he said.
“Don’t call me a racist, Larry. Don’t call me a racist,” Dugan shot back. “Don’t give me those whisper words. Don’t you dare.”
The judge later said he had a “blended, United Nations-type of family” and had conversations with his children about how to act during traffic stops and encounters with immigration agents.
The famously progressive Krasner tried to characterize Dugan as more conservative, saying the former judge “seems to be getting loving words on social media from Philadelphia’s Republican Party.”
And, in a reference that may be lost on many voters, the DA accused Dugan of “bear-hugging” Krasner’s old nemesis John McNesby, the former head of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, during an FOP anti-Krasner event involving a Mr. Softee truck in 2021.
Krasner noted that McNesby had been previously criticized for allegedly “defending the visible wearing of Nazi tattoos” by a police officer.
“Liar. Don’t you say that to me,” Dugan responded. “I was hugging John McNesby with his Nazi tattoos? That’s a lie.”
The tattoo, of an eagle, was a symbol of a German-American police association, McNesby said at the time.
While both candidates attacked each other, after the forum some attendees said they would have liked to hear less from Dugan about Krasner’s supposed flaws and more about what he would do if elected.
“What do you see that needs to change, that you’re going to actually do differently? I don’t necessarily feel like I heard any of that from Judge Dugan,” said Marisa Shaaban, vice president of the Crosstown Coalition. “In fact, I felt a lot of his policies, and a lot of the things he said were quite right-leaning or conservative, which worries me.”
“He said he wanted to make things better, but then he never really added more details,” said Jenny Zhang, an organizer with the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance and board member at the Callowhill Neighborhood Association. “How are you gonna make it better? Can you give me a plan? Larry’s like, well, I already have a plan. This is what we’re doing right now, and things that are changing. Here are the numbers to back that up.”
Another forum for District Attorney and judicial candidates is scheduled for this Sunday, March 23, at 1:30 p.m. at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
