A beloved veteran police officer was murdered last week. The culprit ultimately responsible for his death is behind bars. But without doubt: Liberal, permissive policies have infected our criminal justice system, and Democratic politicians such as Philadelphia District Attorney Lawrence Krasner need to shoulder some of the blame for this entirely preventable cop-killing.

Hassan Elliott , 21, was a wanted man with little left to lose when he encountered Philadelphia Police Cpl. James O’Connor , 46, early Friday morning.

Armed with an arrest warrant for Elliott, members of O’Connor’s SWAT team, accompanied by homicide fugitive task force officers, descended upon a modest row house within Philadelphia’s northeast section of Frankford shortly before 6 a.m. Elliott stood accused of the 2019 murder of Tyree Tyrone in Frankford.

When the apprehension team reached the second floor of the house, gunfire suddenly erupted through a closed door. The withering hail of bullets struck O’Connor in his arm and shoulder. The 23-year police veteran was declared dead shortly afterward at Temple University Hospital.

During the melee, O’Connor’s fellow officers returned fire, wounding Elliott and another person who stood accused in the Tyrone homicide, Khalif Sears, 18.

Law enforcement is an inherently dangerous business. We have become accustomed to the valorous acts performed by members of this noble profession. Sadly, we have also become numb to violence against cops — inured to news reports that yet another officer has been slain in the line of duty .

O’Connor’s case is not unusual. The married father of two spent 15 years on the tactical team. It wasn’t enough simply to serve the department. He needed to accept more responsibility and assume more risk. And like many cop families, public service was a matter of tradition and pedigree. Both his father and his son were cops. His daughter currently serves in the Air Force.

But the man who fired the fatal shots into O’Connor may not be the only figure responsible for the cop-killing. During his campaign to be Pennsylvania's 26th district attorney, Krasner separated himself in a crowded seven-candidate Democratic primary field in 2017 with the infusion of $1.7 million in television ads courtesy of uberliberal billionaire George Soros .

Just last June, Philadelphia magazine published a blistering condemnation of what it referred to as Krasner’s failed “social experiment.” In a piece titled " The disastrous consequences of DA Larry Krasner’s ‘reforms,’ " James D. Schultz assiduously chronicled Krasner’s favored liberal policies and the disastrous effects they were wreaking on public safety in Philadelphia. Schultz points out how gun-related crimes in Krasner’s district spiked and the city’s police force became demoralized by the attorney’s catch-and-release tactics .

Krasner’s preferred method for gun arrests is a foolhardy and dangerous court diversionary program known as Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition . Even first-year criminal justice undergraduates comprehend the correlation between felons in possession of firearms and violent crime. But liberal enablers believe law enforcement is the problem, not the solution.

Feel that I’m engaging in reckless hyperbole? On Monday, the cop-bashing Legal Aid Society in New York City tweeted a call for “an immediate moratorium on NYPD arrests” to coincide with a “release of New Yorkers held on parole violations and others in pretrial detention.” Why?

According to the Legal Aid Society: “We are in the midst of a pandemic and our last priority should be to cycle New Yorkers through our broken criminal justice system, separated from their families, communities, and quality services.”

No, this wasn’t from a parody account.

As breathtakingly insane as that liberal dream may appear, Krasner’s vision aligns with those who misguidedly view America’s incarceration problem not as a product of individual criminality and our affirmed reliance on the rule of law but rather as a fundamental fault within a system designed to incapacitate offenders and deter future crimes.

But on Monday, it was William M. McSwain, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who issued the rarest and most unprecedented of written rebukes against a sitting district attorney. You can almost sense the seething and barely controllable emotion in McSwain’s issuance of a public statement subtitled: “The Murder [of Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor] Was the Direct Result of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s Pro-Violent Defendant Policies.”

McSwain then neatly lays out the succession of failings attendant in Krasner’s execution of duties as defense attorney. Like so many of his fellow liberal elected officials, Krasner has enacted dangerous, unsound public policies, which McSwain enumerates as “permissive bail conditions for violent offenders, failing to pursue serious probation and parole violations by violent criminals, offering lenient plea deals for violent offenses, and outright withdrawing cases against violent felons.”

And this is where Krasner’s failings as Philadelphia’s chief law enforcement officer directly led to O’Connor’s slaying. It is well worth your time to read McSwain’s full statement, which includes mind-numbing missed opportunity after missed opportunity to remand Elliott to jail. McSwain accurately summarizes Krasner’s complicity in Elliott remaining at-large via a sickening chronology that should forever remain affixed to Krasner’s record.

As McSwain accurately sums it up: Krasner’s was “a prosecutor’s office that prioritizes ‘decarceration’ of violent offenders over public safety.”

Tragically, O’Connor paid the ultimate price for the permissive, transformative, criminal-friendly public safety policies predicated on demonizing the very police forces we expect to keep us safe. Krasner’s inexcusable implementation of dangerous leftist policies makes him unfit for office. There are provisions for unfit district attorneys to be removed from office via impeachment. Those efforts are difficult to engineer and often unsuccessful, which leaves it up to Philadelphia voters in 2021 to vote the architect of foolhardy and dangerous policies out of office. Krasner has miserably failed O’Connor’s family and the citizens of Philadelphia.

Let’s pray no more needless deaths occur as a result of ill-advised liberal policies. Enough is enough.

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.