Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, image from her campaign website. Click to enlarge.

What Mrs McDuff posts as her campaign promises actually sounds reasonable, right up until it hits up against political reality:

Most shootings in Philadelphia are perpetrated with illegal firearms. Though the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prevents Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, it is within our legal authority to prosecute individuals possessing guns illegally. The Rhynhart Administration will aggressively pursue those trafficking illegal guns into our city, working in conjunction with law enforcement partners.

Recently, Philadelphia Police have been arresting more people for carrying illegal guns, but prosecutions have not kept pace. As Mayor, Rhynhart will convene a task force with the District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia Police, and the courts to review illegal firearm cases and ensure all three arms of the criminal justice system work cooperatively to eliminate illegal firearms from our streets.

The District Attorney is not a subordinate official to the Mayor, but is independently elected on his own, and the current DA, Larry Krasner, does not want to prosecute people for carrying “illegal guns,” and has said so openly:

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns, and, if it entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops, has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.” He notes that “people of color are disproportionately stopped in Philadelphia and arrested for illegal gun possession in Philadelphia and statewide.” African Americans, who represent 44 percent of Philadelphia’s population, account for about 80 percent of people arrested for illegal gun possession in the city.

The city’s George Soros-sponsored defense attorney now serving as chief prosecutor apparently cannot conceive of the notion that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested for illegal firearms possession because perhaps, just perhaps, a higher percentage of black Philadelphians than whites are carrying guns illegally. Given that the vast majority of shooting and homicide victims in the city are black, you’d think he could figure that out on his own.

“Focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence, but it does erode trust and the perceived legitimacy of the system,” Krasner writes. “This in turn decreases the likelihood that people will cooperate and participate in the criminal legal system and associated processes, reducing clearance, conviction, and witness appearance rates.”

Krasner highlights an oddity of Pennsylvania law that compounds the racially disproportionate impact of arrests for illegal gun possession. For Pennsylvanians generally, carrying a concealed weapon without a license is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in jail and/or a maximum fine of $10,000. For Philadelphia residents, the same offense justifies an additional misdemeanor charge. As a local law firm explains, the combination of those two charges is “almost always graded as a felony,” which means “it may carry significant jail time even for defendants who do not have a prior criminal record.”

That Mr Krasner and his office could, if they so chose, not pursue the additional misdemeanor charge went unspoken, but given that city officials have long sought to be able to pass stricter gun control measures for Philadelphia, the whole thing becomes laughable: the District Attorney wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Yet Mrs McDuff just airily brushes that concern aside.

Sadly, it gets worse, which was my inspiration for this article. In this tweet, Mrs McDuff says, directly, “As your Mayor, I will reduce this homicide rate, I will cut it in half within my first term, from over 500 to under 250, where it was seven years ago.”^[2]Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.

At this point, I would note that even under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the number of homicides was not cut from the 391 in the year before he took office to “under 250,” 246 to be precise, in his first term, but his sixth year in office, and that Administration had far less of a reduction to get under 250.

Mrs McDuff has promised to do something unprecedented. If she wins, will she decline to run for a second term if she fails to meet that first term promise?