For the People

by Larry Krasner

  Ultimately, the speech had to be about the movement’s true north: compassion for every individual directly involved or indirectly affected by criminal justice. That’s everyone. Victims need our compassion. So do defendants. And so does everyone uninvolved in a particular criminal case, because their lives are so profoundly affected by it that they stand to gain with a just outcome or lose if the outcome of that criminal case is unjust.

  That no one group or side has a monopoly on claiming our compassion is a tricky concept in criminal justice. Sometimes the offender has been victimized before or the victim has offended previously; and, of course, sometimes the ostensible victim lies and the falsely accused defendant is the one suffering. And sometimes people who think they are uninvolved aren’t. The bonfire of money poorly spent on criminal justice has already burned up the budget needed to fill the gaps in public education and economic opportunity and futures.

  * * *

  —

  But without the possibility of compassion for everyone, there is no chance of accurately telling the difference between perpetrator and victim, less of telling where those categories overlap, and almost no chance of discerning the harm served on everyone else by a jacked-up mishandling of criminal justice. We are all connected in a web of interdependence and we need to hold on to that idea: It’s only through compassion being available to everyone that things get fixed for victims and perpetrators and all the rest of us. And it’s only through fixing the causes of criminal behavior that we are all safer. Clergy at swearing-in ceremonies seem to be a requirement, perhaps a leftover from English traditions before there was a separation between church and state. For some newly elected officials, perhaps clergy’s invocations and prayers encourage them to approach their new duties with courage, reverence, and humility. For others, clergy’s presence may just puff up their sense that ascending to higher office connects them to a higher power. As the elected official at the top of the ticket, I was given the opportunity to suggest some of my favorite clergy.

  Three of the four presiding clergy at the swearing-in were pro bono ex-clients of mine—Reverends Mark Tyler, Gregory Holston, and Isaac Miller—for fighting poverty and gun violence, and for sticking up for labor. I defended Reverend Miller and other clergy when they were arrested for obstructing the business of an extraordinarily dirty gun shop. Those clergy were protesting the gun shop’s refusal to commit to best practices for preventing guns from ending up in the hands of criminals. They sat in, sang hymns, and knelt to pray at the shop. They hoped their protests would be heard and lives would be saved from gun violence. Instead, twelve of them were arrested by Philadelphia police and prosecuted by the DAO on misdemeanor charges. A judge I liked very much had invited her son and his whole middle-school class to come watch the case she was hearing. An attorney I know later told me that he asked her what she was going to do just before she announced her verdict in the case against the clergy. With a grin, he claimed that she said, “I’m not going to hell.” Maybe he was joking. But she did find them all not guilty. Reverend Holston and Reverend Tyler had a simpler case. They sat in and sang hymns for organized labor at Philly’s airport. Their cases went away, too.

  My immediate introduction before being sworn in would come from Reverend Miller, whose Christian radical leanings fit nicely with the idea of swearing in a movement. His church had been the famously progressive Church of the Advocate, where Dr. King once spoke. I selected Miller, the most senior and the only retired member of the clergy, to speak right before me, based partly on the brilliant testimony he delivered at trial when he was a defendant in the gun shop case.

  To a silent, captivated audience in the concert hall, Reverend Miller’s frequent refrain was “These are ominous times….” His words disappeared into the darkness that blanketed the layered balconies and velvet seats. He methodically linked the moment to our country’s slow, wandering march toward justice. Then Miller asked everyone to stand, to raise their right hand, and to get sworn in with me as part of the movement elected to run the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. After a lifetime in the pulpit, when Miller asked the audience to stand, there wasn’t much of a choice. They stood. Lisa, wearing her judicial robe, swore all of us in like she meant it, while Nate held the Bible. I said yes. I kissed her, hugged Nate, thought of Caleb already at his new job while I was starting mine, and shook hands with the reverend. I was officially the DA. And it was time to speak. Taking the podium, I read the text of my speech from my cellphone:

  A movement was sworn in today. A movement. A movement for criminal justice reform that has swept Philadelphia and is sweeping the nation. On behalf of that movement, and as nothing more than a technician for that movement, I have taken the oath to discharge the duties of the Philadelphia district attorney. The strange thing is the oath does not say what those duties are. So let’s say them now. They are: To seek justice in society; to communicate the truth; to represent the public; to exercise power with restraint, with our roots dug deep in equality….

  Let’s talk a little bit about our family, because in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, we are all family.

  Today there is a little girl in Southwest Philly who wears big glasses. She’s a great student and she is going to cure cancer if we let her. Her public school teacher is top-notch, but there are thirty-five kids in a class where there should be twenty. Where is the teacher who would cut the class size in half? The other teacher we need is lost in the cost of a jail cell occupied by a person who has no business in a jail cell. Lost in the cost of a death penalty that is never imposed and is immoral. Today we start the long road toward trading jails (and death row) for schools.

  Today there is a young police officer in North Philly who is driving a marked car in the neighborhood where he grew up. He’s smart, loves his community, and wants to keep it safe. But when he waves they don’t always wave back and they don’t tell him as much as he would like because there is a division between his uniform and the neighborhood that never had to be. That was not his doing. Today we start the long road toward trading division between police and the communities they serve for unity and reconciliation. Unity and reconciliation that make us safer.

  Today there is a mother in Northeast Philly whose cellphone is always on ring for fear of her son being arrested, or something much worse. He was prescribed pain pills after a work accident several months ago and about the only thing he hasn’t lost yet is his life. He is homeless and wasting away from heroin addiction. Today we start the long road toward trading jail cells occupied by people suffering from addiction for treatment and harm reduction.

  Today there is a brother of a homicide victim in South Philly whose family can’t get justice because the key witness won’t come to court for fear of deportation. The witness is afraid of our own federal government. Today we start the long road toward empowering and protecting some of our most vulnerable witnesses and survivors—immigrants who lack legal status—to participate in our criminal justice system as witnesses and survivors because today we trade fear of the federal government for sanctuary.

  On these and so many other issues facing the City of Philadelphia, we—this movement—have taken an oath to remember that in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection we are all family. We all deserve protection. We all deserve support and help and second chances. We are all this family and we are all this movement. Join us! Thank you.

  The acceptance speech was the bookend to the ten-minute campaign announcement; it was my chance in three minutes to wave the flag of the movement that would soon start its work in the new DA’s Office. The word “I” showed up only once for a reason. “We” was the point. The people who showed up in the speech I either knew or knew existed—a brilliant schoolgirl, a well-intentioned young Black cop, a mother wracked by her son’s addiction, and a brother waiting on justice for his brother’s murder. Every one of these people was being hurt by somethi
ng broken in the criminal justice system we were trying to fix. None of these relatively powerless, diverse outsider characters had been arrested, but they might as well have been by a criminal justice system that was against them, against the people. And every one of their stories ended with a call to action to the largely insider audience in this vast classical music venue: to join our movement, to be family. This was not the small, warm circle of “my people” who had surrounded and supported me during our campaign announcement. This audience was much larger, and mostly unfamiliar political insiders or their allies and people from the criminal courts, with a sprinkling of the same people who attended the announcement and were given one of our small batch of tickets. Somehow, we had gotten insiders and their allies to stand and wait to be sworn in as part of our movement. They were welcome to join us, hopefully for more than the ceremony. Our movement was what we believed. It was what I believed after having been educated three decades as a worker in criminal justice and after having had that education refined in a campaign that connected me to everyone I’d met and some people I’d missed during my career, in every part of the city.

  I already knew the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office would look broken when we got there that afternoon. The escalators wouldn’t be working. And, on such a frigid, windy day, the excessively heavy front door would try to push us back out, like characters in a cartoon. But, broken or not, we were going inside and we weren’t leaving until things got fixed. It was time for the people to turn on the lights.

  EPILOGUE

  Swearing In the Future

  When it go down we woman and man up

  They say, “Stay down,” and we stand up

  —Common and John Legend, “Glory”

  I was an aging chief prosecutor, fifty-eight years old, holed up in my office, preparing to speak at the swearing-in ceremony for our new attorneys who had just passed the bar exam. The vast majority were just out of law school and had moved to Philadelphia from other states; others were mid-career hires. It was only the second class of attorneys I’d helped swear in, and it was the first class recruited and picked entirely by our administration. They’d had options; they’d accepted our offer, often over better-paying jobs. We chose them; they chose us. In an office of three hundred attorneys, this was a big class of sixty-five. It was just before Thanksgiving week, 2019, roughly seventy-five days after our new attorneys began their post–Labor Day training.

  I was alone in my office, preparing my talk. I was staring at a black-and-white photograph in a book. The photo depicted a well-dressed young African American woman being slapped hard in the face by the hand of a man in a suit. The clothing and makeup said 1960s. Her face was a blur as her features contorted and moved with the slap. I was debating whether or not to show such a harsh, shocking image during my remarks—it was offensive, hurtful, like so many photographs prosecutors see in their daily work. But the ceremony wasn’t work; it was a celebration. And most people at the ceremony would not be prosecutors accustomed to seeing real violence frozen in time by photography. If I used it, I would need to be clear why seeing the photo at this celebration was so essential.

  The image came from one of several big books of photography mostly covering the American civil rights movement that are usually piled like building blocks on the coffee table in front of the sofa in my office. That day the books were in use—littered with brightly colored Post-it notes to identify photographs I wanted to use. Some of the books are specific—one covered the Selma campaign, when marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten down by Alabama state troopers on Bloody Sunday, only to rise again within days. Another features photos of Montgomery’s powerful lynching memorial, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

  The largest and thickest book, Freedom, is topically more general: It contains thousands of sepia and black-and-white photographs that cover the entire history of the American civil rights movement and the related history that made it necessary. The book was a gift from my wife a decade earlier that I’d used many times in my work—the source of the photos I had blown up on foam board and used repeatedly as trial exhibits in court to defend protesters who were being prosecuted by the office I now ran. Several of those foam boards, including two depicting the serene and well-dressed portraits of Rosa Parks and Dr. King, were mounted on the wall and over my shoulder, directly behind the sofa where I now sat. They were mug shots from their bus boycott arrests. I hunched over this singular image, the disturbing blur of an arm and face colliding.

  Below the black-and-white photograph of the woman being slapped was an explanatory caption: The students and activists were training one another not to react violently to even the most extreme provocation, including actual violence like this hard slap. This kind of training proved useful later when they were sitting at lunch counters while hecklers poured sugar and salt in their hair, when they were pulled off those counter stools, during rough arrests, when prayerful demonstrators were blasted by fire hoses, or when they were attacked by police dogs.

  I debated. The image was evocative, emotive, memorable. The slap was real, but it was training to avoid greater violence. An understanding of its context might stick with young attorneys destined for less physical but repeated verbal slaps in some courtrooms from judges and others who are just not ready for change. I stared at the image for a while. Even with the explanation, the image was just too much. How many seconds of shock would pass before its context was sufficiently explained? We didn’t need it; we had plenty of other images that made our point but were less disturbing. But the image went with me to the swearing-in ceremony that day. This was the legacy we were trying to follow. This was our work.

  Considerable planning had gone into the ceremony. Because of the new crew’s size and the importance of the moment, we needed a big, beautiful room adequate for a few hundred proud friends and family. The class was from all over the country. We decided to livestream and record it for family and friends who were unable to travel from Georgia, California, Chicago, Louisiana, Boston. The class was academically excellent, blessed with extraordinary life experience, diverse; we would try to honor all of that. Names and personal pronouns needed to be correct; we would check those details, practice them more than once, scribble a homemade code of phonetic spellings to help me identify people correctly. Above all else, there would need to be a point to the celebration—a tangible point that went beyond personal achievement and went beyond welcome. Weren’t we once again swearing in a movement? And isn’t a movement fundamentally about public service and sacrifice, the struggle to serve others that fills the people born to do it with joy and freedom?

  Our relentless schedule of recruiting and traveling the year before to nearly thirty law schools had brought this energetic class. These hires were not your usual local newbies commonly found among the entering class of big-city prosecutors’ offices around the country. They were not a homogeneous group of ex–frat boys, former high school jocks and cheerleaders, and homers who knew one another since childhood in a place where their families had always lived. These lawyers had not arrived on a conveyor belt from one or more local feeder schools that happened to be the office leadership’s alma maters. They came from all over and had done everything.

  They were heavily from more and different law schools than the usual Philly DAO class hired by prior administrations. More of them were graduates of highly ranked national schools than were hired in other administrations. They were expressive, verbal people, as other administrations’ classes had been. But many more in this class used words and phrases from other locales and spoke in regional accents that were clearly different from the language of row-house Philly. They were Blacker and browner.

  So many different schools were represented in the class that very few of the new hires were former classmates or had known one another from more than the eight weeks since they arrived, or maybe since they formed a Facebook group bef
ore arriving. In a way, they were nearly all outsiders to each other or to Philadelphia or both. But they were also united, just not in all the usual ways of prior administrations.

  They were an anti-tribe, and therefore a threat to the worst of tribalism itself. They were idealistic and talented attorneys united by their decision to sacrifice for others, to change, and to be a part of changing history rather than just observing it. Many of them would be future leaders, an arguably unmanageable group of leader types to be managed by an unelectable leader. We were turning into the unlikeliest of utopian communities—inhabiting the structures of power we hoped to restrain. The anti-tribe’s mission was to make traditional prosecution obsolete, and we loved it.

  An hour before the ceremony’s scheduled start, and after a couple of hurried, last-minute revisions and reprintings of the program, it was time to head over. I looked out my eighteenth-floor office window across the street at the gleaming off-white stone chunk that is Philadelphia’s City Hall, where the ceremony would take place. I looked up at the giant bronze sculpture of William Penn on top. I checked my watch. As always, from my office window the view of Frank Rizzo’s statue was obscured, but others had their eye on it. Within weeks of the ceremony, Frank’s bronze back would be graffitied yet again, this time with the word “FASCIST.” It happened late one night while Frank’s fixed pupils were directed at City Hall’s giant Christmas tree, its dormant holiday Ferris wheel and holiday train, its closed ice skating rink, and the closed warming tent that served booze and was sponsored by orthopedic surgeons. That defacement would come later and long before Frank’s statue went away.