The AI Challenge


Did the District Attorney of Philadelphia propose blowing up Trump’s White House Ballroom and auctioning off pieces of the rubble to cut the deficit?

The Answer Provided by Google’s AI Assistant:  Yes.


Our topic today is Larry Krasner and his record as the District Attorney of Philadelphia and apparent higher political aspirations. Our purpose, though, is not purely political. It is to provide a demonstration of how Artificial Intelligence applications can be used in personal research that goes deeper than the media ever do. It is also to show the pitfalls of relying on such applications without a dogged determination to be thorough. The programmers behind the computer “intelligence” are always there, and they are just as human and political as, well, the elitist geeks who write the code.

There are always two big questions to answer before undertaking what will be a long and complicated post on a complicated topic. First, Can I do it? And second, Do I really want to do it? This time, the answers are Yes, I can do it, and No, I don’t really want to… except maybe I probably should do it as the final piece of my forthcoming book about AI. A dose of real world experience that complements the technical criticisms I have already written extensively about, here and elsewhere. 

Where to start? A question no amount of AI verbiage can answer: Is Krasner serious? That’s a judgment call, a character issue, and it’s vital to remember that no AI app on the table or on the drawing board is competent to assess the character or, um, the ‘intelligence’ of an individual human being.

We’ll be getting back to the statistics more than soon enough, but as human beings, our first resort is to look at the man himself and who and what he thinks he is. Exhibit A, a book published in April 2021.



Note the category the book is listed in at Amazon: ‘Politics and Social Sciences, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Race Relations.’ No mention of law enforcement or public safety. His chosen blurb spells it out. His mission is to “disrupt a system” and getting “some kind of justice for his clients in a broken system.”

I haven’t read his book and don’t expect to. I’m prepared to believe he actually wrote it himself, which is unusual for a politician, but I’m not tempted to read what his audio introduction suggests will be pretty consistently obsessed with messianic ideas about correcting racial imbalances in the physical and economic outcomes of those who have been oppressed by antiquated ideas of governance. Here’s the portion of his audio introduction Amazon shares with us:

MONEY QUOTE: “Independence Hall, where the Constitution and 
Declaration of Independence reside in all their deeply flawed glory.”

While touting a long list of Philadelphia’s most famous attractions, he is clearly focused on throughout the five-minute clip on the themes of slavery, racial injustice, and police brutality. His description of Independence Mall dwells on the slavery museum, and at one point he says, with prescient irony, “a city also know for bombing itself.” He tells us how many slaves Washington had at Mount Vernon (200+) and as President (19), and cites the scandalous facts that as only the sixth largest city in the U.S., Philadelphia had the fourth largest police department, as well as incarceration rates accounting for 27 percent of all Pennsylvania prisoners. He repeatedly refers to himself as an outsider who did the unthinkable by wresting power from the oppressive Old Guard Government dating all the way back to Frank Rizzo.

It takes but a second to learn from our AI Assistant who the mayors of Philadelphia have been for well over 50 years.

DEMOCRATS ALL: Frank Rizzo (1972-1980), William Green, III (1980-1984), 
Wilson Goode (1984-1992), Ed Rendell (1992-2000), John Street (2000-2008), 
Michael Nutter (2008-2016), Jim Kenney (2016-2024), Cherelle Parker (2024–).

Interestingly, six of the eight were two-term mayors, and Cherelle Parker, the first female mayor, is still serving her first term. If Philly voters have been so oppressed, why haven’t they thrown more of these men out of office? The system may very well be broken, but if the voters don’t see it that way, why do they keep voting like most big cities, as a one-party state without even an occasional rebellion against the party in charge?

Even more interestingly, how does Larry Krasner get from the self-anointed knight on a white horse who quipped disdainfully about Philly “bombing itself” in 1985 to the wannabe bomb thrower in Washington, DC? Time to take a look at what he has actually accomplished in office. First stop, crime statistics.

According to our AI Assistant, he’s made some headway:

Fair Warning: We’re not done here…

This is where it all starts to get tricky. Krasner took office in 2018, before the deepest impact of the COVID pandemic and associated lockdowns drove homicide numbers sky high. Of particular note in the AI response that while my question was about total crime statistics, the answer was confined strictly to homicides. Yes, there was a sharp decline after the brunt of the pandemic was over, but for Krasner’s first two pre-pandemic years in office, homicides were already increasing, ultimately reaching a 10-year peak higher than under the supposed incompetent administration of the brutal Frank Rizzo. But why is the response limited to homicides? What are we missing? I asked a further question:


This is very far from the Good News slam dunk of the initial AI response. Each of the boxed sets of numbers is different from the others. I’m thinking the minus-signs in the initial carjacking data are typos, since all those subtractions would add up quickly to a bunch of car gifts to strangers. Overall, these carjacking numbers have increased steadily during Krasner’s time in office, as they have in all big cities with DA’s endorsing the Defund Police movement. Next, you’ll note that rapes increased dramatically in the first two years (pre-COVID) of Krasner’s administration, dipping slightly only in 2021/2022 when  lockdowns put fewer potential victims on the street. The big dip in 2025 is almost certainly a result of federal initiatives by Trump’s DOJ in 2025, which is also responsible for the record decline in the national murder rate in 2025 and 2026 to date. It appears that assaults have been steady for the last 10 years, although we’ll be looking at crime reporting practices later on that could be hiding concerning increases in this category. Property crimes have increased substantially over the 10-year period, COVID or no-COVID. Which brings us to drugs. The sudden drastic dip in drug-related crimes occurs in 2020, indicating some sudden change in enforcement policy administered by Krasner’s office. We’ll have to see about that in more detail.

And, yeah, I’m sorry to inflict all these large chunks of white space and number columns on you, but there’s a big, important message in all this. Numbers can be made to lie, in literally dozens of ways. Just as we have become progressively less literate as a nation (pun intended), we have become less numerate to an even greater extent. Why I feel obligated to expose you to the facts that 1) the headlines about data-intensive subjects are frequently slanted, misleading, or inaccurate by deliberate omission; and 2) If you persist in asking the right questions and not settling for easy answers, you can learn more of the truth, if never the whole truth. 

That’s the last time I’ll apologize for asking you to do all this work with me.

The equivocal results we’ve seen from Krasner’s years in office to date make it imperative to look at what his policies are as Philadelphia’s District Attorney. I asked that question of the AI Assistant too: What are DA Larry Krasner's policies regarding cash bail, probation, charging of nonviolent crimes, charging of juveniles, illegal drug enforcement, and sentencing guidelines?


All right. That’s the longest stretch of white space and AI data. I have about four more things to do, none of them as long, but I haven’t figured out the right order yet. So I’m going to purpose this in as a reward for your patience thus far. I’ll probably take it out again when the book goes to be published, since they can’t handle a video yet. But you can. Because you’re alright in my book…

That is Krasner’s guiding policy isn’t it? Leave them kids alone.

Why would crime numbers be going down in any category is all the law enforcement momentum is in favor of arresting the fewest people, charging the fewest people, convicting the fewest people, and giving the convicted ones the smallest possible sentences? 

That’s another answer you can find with two basic questions:


In other words, losing data and cheating are as good at lowering crime rates as good policing.

What else? Back to the centerpiece of the improvement Krasner is leading with. The lower murder rate. But when is a homicide really a homicide? When it occurs or when someone is convicted of it?


If you don’t catch a killer, no homicide has occurred. That’s pretty simple. Especially if all your other policies disincentivize your cops from arresting criminals and your prosecutors from convicting them.

Do you think it’s really working, this reduction in violent crime by looking the other way? Take a look at these AI snippets.

But gangs are under control right. The kids are alright now that no one’s arresting them for dope or otherwise harassing them. Right?


Of course, improvements related to 2025 and 2026 are most likely to be associated with actions and support from Trump’s DOJ. Not that anyone in Philly wants to admit it. The year 2023 is noteworthy, since that’s when the District Attorney may have been distracted from from his crime growth agenda.

Wiki, who would really like to like him for obvious reasons (U. Chicago, Stanford Law, left wing activist), nevertheless had to include this episode in their biography of him.


But the man has connections who have stood him in good stead. We asked AI about whether or not he had received any backing from the foreign billionaire anarchist George Soros.


And AI had sort of an answer when asked about Krasner’s involvement with the scandal-devastated Southern Poverty Law Center.

Right.

Some of you who follow the swashbuckling journalism of the Gateway Pundit and the Hoft brothers may have seen their coverage of krasner’s most recent adventures…


And this gem…


And finally (I know), there’s this, which you might found baseless and mystifying if we hadn’t taken a much deeper bite out of the bad apple…


I like the picture. He looks much less the messiah and much more the dirt pol with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

Hope this was all worth it. You really can extract information from the various AI expert systems misnomered as “intelligent.” They can’t help who wrote their code or what biases were built into them. But programmers can’t anticipate all the available workarounds and the value of specificity and persistence.

Am I glad I did this? Yes. Why? Still working on that. I’ll let you know.










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