Audience has lukewarm reactions to district attorney candidates in first community forum

Crime prevention through community

By Emily L. Davis. April 01, 2025.

Photo: Courtesy of Human Rights Coalition.

This is the second article of the district attorney’s first community forum coverage. Check the first part here.

Community engagement plays a key role in facilitating crime prevention. 

“The best way to deal with public safety is a way that is holistic. And part of what our office has done was we tried to break the paradigm of how support for community-based organizations goes,” said Krasner.

Dugan’s focus is on a different part of community engagement: contacting witnesses. 

“If there's a heinous crime committed in your neighborhood, don't you think you should be aware of when the court date is if you're a victim or if your family member has been a murder victim? Don't you think that it is owed to you to get a call from a district attorney to make sure you show up? Too many people don't get those calls. I saw it almost every day in my courtroom,” Dugan said, attributing this to a systemic lack of training on the DA office’s part. 

The DA’s office is not unfamiliar with community disagreements. Krasner says that his office handles such situations by holding meetings where people bring up issues they have.

“I need to hear it from people within the office. I need to hear it from outside the office, and we need to work on solutions together. I think that's actually very important, very constructive, to hear from people when they disagree with you,” he said.

Dugan agreed with this sentiment, saying, “You have to sit down and talk. You have to listen to ideas. You have to bring other people in. The one thing that I'll never tell anybody is that I know all the answers.”

In the latter part of the forum, the candidates were asked individual questions by the audience, starting with their approach to prosecuting children.

When asked if children would be prosecuted as adults, Dugan said no with some exceptions for murder, rape, and “extreme indifference to human life.”  

For children who are accomplices, Dugan said, “Those are juveniles that we should be grabbing and looking to do some restorative, rehabilitative type justice before it's too late. But we have to take a serious look when the crimes are that violent.”

Krasner was questioned about his office’s current practices, in light of the fact that he ran on a pledge of treating kids of kids and has housed juveniles in uninhabitable adult facilities.   

“I'm going to ask everybody to listen carefully because I think it's important that people understand what is going on. I do not control the juvenile facilities. I wish I did, they would be completely different. What happened is a whole bunch of snake pits got closed, and that people who hate the fact that I'm trying to keep juveniles in the juvenile system, thought the best way to manage that was to make sure there were no facilities that could be expanded, that were humane, that would be for juveniles who commit serious offenses but should be addressed in the juvenile system.”

Notable questions

If elected, Dugan plans to assign Senior DAs to six areas of the city, in alignment with police divisions. He explained that these DAs would be as diverse as Philadelphia is, and in place to talk to victims or their families about their case. 

In terms of exoneration policies, Krasner says that his office drops charges if someone is able to demonstrate their innocence. He added that in addition to getting innocent people released, they’re also working with the cold case department to find who committed the crime in question. He added that the CIU is limited, with only 10 lawyers working on a list of over 1,000 people, and he hasn’t been able to secure more funding for lawyers from the city budget. 

When asked if he’d keep the CIU, Dugan said yes, but the cases need to be vetted more. 

“I will make sure that every case is vetted, so I don't have a federal judge question the integrity of the motion that our people put in. And that's a fact. …  I would want my attorneys to go back and vet due diligence and make sure that we're not putting something in front of a judge who's got to make that determination, that we're giving them some falsehoods, we're giving them some inaccuracies, we're giving them some omissions that we contacted a family when they didn't, but they tell the judge that we contacted the family of the murder victims. That is part of the stuff that I cannot tolerate, even in a great unit like that. We need to make sure that each and every case is vetted properly,” said Dugan.

The moderator asked the candidates’ opinion on giving cases from the CIU to organizations such as the Innocence Project and Second Justice or law schools, to vet. Dugan thought it was a great idea, while Krasner confirmed that those organizations were already involved in the process, but liked the idea of law students helping. 

“We could have law students coming in as interns to assist. They don't have the trial experience. They can't do deep dives like our attorneys can, but they can assist in ways that are important, so that is something that we could supplement. But the truth is, we have these internships, but a lot of them got very disturbed during the pandemic, and to me, that seems like a constructive direction for us to go,” he said. 

Reactions from community members 

Jeff Smith, member of Mothers in Charge and Germantown Hub for Justice. Photo: Emily L. Davis for Inti Media.

Jeff Smith is a member of Mothers in Charge and Germantown Hub for Justice, who wanted to hear the candidates talk about reducing crime and reducing the prison population in Philadelphia. The latter, Smith said, “is an idea that not everyone has to go to jail because they do something stupid.”

He also said that the forum didn’t change his mind on either candidate. 

Smith had spoken to Krasner at another event that was held in Germantown about his son (who was incarcerated at the time) and liked Krasner’s response. 

Smith continued by saying, “I like the things he said. I like the things he's done. I like the programs he's tried to put into effect. Like I said, he's tried to work with a lot of our community groups, Frontline Dads, Mothers in Charge. He's been to talk with our group. So there are a lot of groups that he's tried to work with, and I believe that [it’s] the community that helps to bring down the course of people going to jail.”

Dom Shannon came out to learn more about the candidates, but especially Dugan, since he was already familiar with Krasner. He came away from the event with a more negative view of Dugan, but says he’ll go to forums in the future to form a more well-rounded opinion of him. Photo: Emily L. Davis for Inti Media.

Dom Shannon came out to learn more about the candidates, but especially Dugan, since he was already familiar with Krasner. 

“I think especially under Trump now it’s super important to have a DA who will respect and protect the values of Philadelphia and what Philadelphians care about and I think that Krasner does do that and I was interested to hear if Patrick Dugan was aligned or what his take on that stuff was,” Shannon stated. 

He walked away from the forum with some unanswered questions. Prior to the forum, he had done some research about Dugan and said that he found some of his statements contradictory, specifically on safety. 

Shannon brought up that several people were shot during evictions while Dugan was overseeing the Landlord and Tenant Office.  

“Is that something that he would look into as a DA, or is that a record that he could explain away?” he asked. 

Overall, he came away from the event with a more negative view of Dugan, but says he’ll go to forums in the future to form a more well-rounded opinion of him. 

Faith Adams is a member of Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration (CADBI), an organization that is campaigning to end Life Without Parole sentences in Pennsylvania, that put on a DA forum during Krasner's first election campaign. Photo: Emily L. Davis for Inti Media.

Faith Adams is a member of Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration (CADBI), an organization that is campaigning to end Life Without Parole sentences in Pennsylvania, that put on a DA forum during Krasner's first election campaign. She came to this forum because of the work Kranser has been doing to help her son, who was wrongfully convicted of murder, get out of prison through the CIU. 

The issues she hoped to hear about were the drop in murders and shooting, as well as how candidates were going to reinforce the CIU. A question that she has that is still unanswered deals with misconduct.

“I have an 8x10 paper that’s a list of detectives and judges who did or acted on misconduct. And I wanted to know what was going to be done about that because it’s a lot of detectives. Three of the detectives who worked on my son's case are on that list,” Adams said. 

Beyond the personal connection, her focus on this issue is due to wanting police accountability and protection for communities from the police, especially for Black and Brown people. 

Like Smith, the forum did not change her opinion of either candidate.  

Judge James DeLeon is a retired Philadelphia municipal judge. Photo: Emily L. Davis for Inti Media.

Judge James DeLeon is a retired Philadelphia municipal judge. He came out to the forum to see how Krasner and Dugan interacted and because his son was one of the organizers. 

In addition to crime and diversion court, DeLeon wanted to hear about keeping victims in the loop about their cases, which is a point Dugan brought up a few times.

He came away feeling that diversion courts like Dawn Court and AMP should have been discussed more. 

“So what Judge Dugan was saying is that under the current leadership in the District Attorney's Office, those programs have been downgraded. What District Attorney Krasner is saying is that he's working with community groups, but you’ve got to work with not just the community groups, but you also have to work with the court. Okay? Because these people are coming through the court,” he explained, adding that it has to be a two-pronged approach, working with both the courts and the community. 

When asked if the forum changed his opinion, he said, “I was glad to see Judge Dugan come out hitting … I was glad to see that because this is a race that's important in the city for everyone… because I know both sides, so it didn't change. There's nothing I heard from District Attorney Krasner that changes my opinion as to what's going on in that office. And I know what Judge Dugan was saying, he knows what he's talking about.”

Colette White, member of Positive Women’s Network, came out for Krasner, and the biggest issue she wanted to see discussed was second chances. Photo: Emily L. Davis for Inti Media.

Colette White, a member of Positive Women’s Network, came out for Krasner, and the biggest issue she wanted to see discussed was second chances. From what Dugan said she didn’t feel that he would make any improvements, adding, “I'm from the Lynne Abraham era, and the judge, he seems to want to go back that way.” 

She also felt that she didn’t hear enough about how mental health is being handled in the criminal justice system.

Although the forum didn’t change her mind on who to vote for, White worries about voter turnout for this election as well as Dugan’s views. 

“He doesn't seem to have any different ideas,” White said. “He's more like going back to the ways that it was in the 60s, and that’s going backwards. And a lot of things in the world today are upside down, [we should be] trying to keep our state and our city and our local on a more upward way. And hopeful, this doesn’t seem to be hopeful.” 

One view of Dugan’s that she particularly didn’t like was his enthusiasm for pretrial risk assessments. She believes that character witnesses and evaluating the person are better than using an area’s statistics to determine what someone is likely to do. 

“An individual is an individual,” she concluded.

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