DA Larry Krasner is unusually silent after charging a record number of Philly cops in grant theft scandal

Late in the afternoon on Nov. 7, a Friday, the Philadelphia Police Department announced that nine current and former police officers had been charged with conspiring to defraud the city by using a grant-funded youth boxing program to pad their salaries.

It was the largest number of Philly officers charged together with misconduct in nearly 40 years — a seemingly splashy case for District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive prosecutor who has made charging cops a cornerstone of his two terms in office.

Yet Krasner has been unusually quiet about it.

The district attorney was traveling in Switzerland for a conference when the charges became public. His office declined to comment, held no news conference, and issued no public statements — in stark contrast to his trumpeting of police misconduct cases in the past.

Krasner has charged dozens of police officers since taking office in 2018. But he did not publicly acknowledge his largest booking to date until The Inquirer approached him at an unrelated news conference, nearly a week after these most-recent charges were filed.

And even then, he was reluctant to talk about it.

“We had probable cause that they committed the crimes,” Krasner said Thursday. “Having said that, I wanna be very clear: There are a lot of great cops in the city. … I don’t think that this group of nine should in any way taint the rest of them.”

Prosecutors accuse Nashid Akil, former captain of the 22nd District in North Philadelphia, and eight of his officers of stealing $44,576 in taxpayer-funded anti-violence grant money between January and September 2022, according to charging documents.

Those funds came from a $392,000 city grant awarded to Epiphany Fellowship Church to support Guns Down, Gloves Up, a boxing and youth mentorship program that Akil founded at his nearby district building. No one from the church was charged, and Krasner said Thursday the church should not be “tainted” by the allegations against police.

City employees are prohibited from receiving grant dollars. Yet after vowing in the grant application that police time would be volunteered, Akil, using the church as a pass-through, allegedly paid himself and eight district officers for their work as boxing instructors, an arrangement that came to light through an Inquirer investigation in 2023.

Police now say some officers were paid during their scheduled shift hours.

A law enforcement source familiar with the case said the district attorney’s office concluded its probe into the grant scheme months ago. Krasner did not approve the charges until Oct. 31, according to a police department spokesperson. That was days before the Nov. 4 election, when Krasner was handily reelected to a third term. The defendants began surrendering to authorities three days later.

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel issued a statement after the arrests saying he was “deeply troubled” by the officers’ alleged actions and “particularly disappointed by the involvement of a former commanding officer.”

But neither Krasner nor his spokesperson responded at the time to repeated requests for comment.

On Thursday, Krasner attributed the timing of the charges to logistical issues with bringing in the nine codefendants.

Akil was forced to resign in February 2023 after The Inquirer’s reporting on the boxing program, and three other officers who allegedly took the money had since resigned. Bethel has moved to fire the five active officers.

Only one of the nine officers listed an attorney in court records, and that lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Officials at Epiphany Fellowship Church did not respond to a request for comment.

The last time nine officers were charged together in Philadelphia was in 1986, for taking bribes to conceal an underground gambling ring.

Since the charges were filed in the boxing program scandal, Krasner’s office has put out nine news releases — but nothing on the nine officers charged.

It’s a departure from how the typically loquacious district attorney has handled previous allegations of police misconduct.

In 2021, for example, when The Inquirer was reporting on widespread abuse of the department’s injured-on-duty program, Krasner said he believed some officers were “gaming the system, and in my opinion, committing crimes by engaging in fraudulent practices to stay home.” The disability system was reformed and hundreds of officers returned to work, but no criminal charges were filed.

The next year, Krasner issued a lengthy news release after the arrest of Officer Daniel Levitt on perjury and related charges, stemming from an allegedly illegal search that led to the recovery of a handgun. The charges against Levitt were initially dismissed but have since been refiled.

In 2023, Krasner was again out front in announcing the arrest of former Officer Patrick Henon for sexually assaulting young girls. Henon pleaded guilty.

In May, Krasner called a news conference after a jury convicted two former detectives convicted of making false statements about DNA evidence.

A month later, when Donald Suchinsky, a former homicide detective, was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting relatives of murder victims, Krasner appeared outside the Criminal Justice Center to condemn Suchinsky’s conduct and urge any other victims to come forward.

And in July, Krasner again held a news conference to criticize what he called a lenient sentence of former Officer Mark Dial, who was paroled following his voluntary manslaughter conviction in the shooting of Eddie Irizarry.

“I am deeply disappointed with a verdict that I think makes people lose faith in the criminal justice system,” Krasner said.

In contrast, when approached by reporters Thursday, Krasner requested an advance list of questions about the alleged grant misappropriation, then huddled privately with two of his top prosecutors for several minutes before offering little comment.

Asked about his reticence toward this case compared with past cases, Krasner alluded to outside concerns.

“We have to do certain things in court in a certain kind of way, and we have to operate with our partners, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

He declined further questions.

Krasner’s uncharacteristic silence has not gone unnoticed by nearly a dozen communications consultants, lawyers, and law enforcement officials, who spoke with The Inquirer on the condition that they not be named.

They speculated that Krasner might be downplaying the arrests due to political sensitivities or because — unlike in cases of wrongful arrests and shootings — there is not a clear victim in this case, outside of city taxpayers. Some acknowledged that there could also be legal reasons why Krasner would decline to draw additional attention to the arrests.

Carl Day, a pastor who runs Culture Changing Christians, noted that Krasner is allied with Black clergy members who have supported his political campaigns. Day suggested that the district attorney might be trying to avoid further scrutiny into the church that was in charge of the grant.

“My hope and belief is that it’s a level of respect,” Day said. “In this work, you become scrutinized a ton and placed under microscopes, especially when you are a Black-led organization and getting government money.”

The boxing program scandal is one of several incidents that have raised concern about the city’s oversight of millions of anti-violence grants, scores of which have been awarded to small nonprofits in the Black community.

Day said nonprofit leaders need to be held accountable for misspent funds, but he argued that Black-led nonprofits, many of which do not have the financial resources of large organizations that typically get city grants, face heightened scrutiny.

If that is the case, Day said, he is puzzled why Krasner wouldn’t come out and say so.

“It’s to be continued,” he said.