This article was published in collaboration with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America.

On August 14, Philadelphia police tried to serve a man named Maurice Hill with an arrest warrant for a drug charge. Hill had an extensive criminal history that included robbery, aggravated assault, and illegal possession of a gun. He was also armed with an AK-47. As police moved in, he started firing, and by the time he surrendered, eight hours later, six officers had been wounded.

The next day, the federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Bill McSwain, blamed the confrontation not on Hill, but on the preeminent public official charged with upholding the law in Philadelphia. “The crisis was precipitated by a stunning disrespect for law enforcement,” McSwain said in a statement. “There is a new culture of disrespect for law enforcement in this city that is promoted and championed by District Attorney Larry Krasner.”

It is the kind of accusation that Krasner, 59, has grown accustomed to hearing ever since he won election in 2017. The left-wing prosecutor, who emphatically rejects the tough-on-crime philosophy that has prevailed for decades in cities across the country, has been called pro-criminal and anti-police, the “worst district attorney” in America, and a stooge of liberal billionaire George Soros.

Despite McSwain’s attempt to blame Krasner for the Hill shooting, court documents uncovered by The Appeal showed that Hill had repeatedly been released following arrests because he had acted as an informant for the local federal prosecutors’ office—that is, at the behest of McSwain’s predecessor. And Hill surrendered only after his attorney got in touch with Krasner, who went to the scene to persuade Hill he’d be safe if he turned himself in for arrest.