Hey, everyone, today's show is the second part of a series we started just yesterday with an episode we called The Ferguson Effect.

If you haven't had a chance to listen to that one, you might like today's story even better if you go back and check it out.

Either way, here we go.

It's hard to paint with a broad brush because everyone has such differing opinions on everything that's happening here.

Chris Palmer works at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covers criminal justice.

He talked to me from the middle of his newsroom.

You know what I mean? Even within the system itself, which makes it really fun to cover, but also challenging in the way of

offering sweeping observations for a podcast that could be listened to by any of those people

who have a different opinion.

I called him up because I wanted him to explain just how quickly Philadelphia's approach to criminal

justice is changing.

He is a reporter's reporter.

He doesn't like to say more than he knows.

What we do know is that in 2018, prosecutors filed 18% fewer cases than in 2017.

If you look back even further, like five years ago, Philadelphia prosecutors today, they're filing half as many cases.

This isn't because crime has plummeted. It's because the city is rethinking how crime gets punished, even what constitutes a crime in the first place.

And in the last year, this trend has been supercharged by a brand new district attorney named Larry Krasner.

Chris says to understand what Krasner's up to, you have to come with him to one courtroom in Center City, Philadelphia, this case he was watching last summer.

And the DA himself had actually attended this proceeding, which was a bit unusual, because the top prosecutor,

you know, normally in the past has not attended these types of things.

This was a murder case.

An up-and-coming real estate developer, a guy named Sean Skellinger, had been killed after getting

...