After years of warring with the FOP, Philly DA Larry Krasner says he likes its new president

Is a yearslong cold war in Philadelphia’s law enforcement community starting to thaw?

District Attorney Larry Krasner says he has developed a good working relationship with Roosevelt Poplar, the new head of the city’s police union, which has long been one of the reform-oriented DA’s loudest critics.

Krasner called Poplar a “heroic figure” and a “very sensible, engaging, serious head” of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5.

Poplar “understands that his job is to support and lift up righteous policing,” Krasner said, unprompted, during an interview on an unrelated topic. “And his job is not to be in the bag for dysfunctional policing.”

The remarks stood in stark contrast to the heated battle Krasner was locked in for years with Poplar’s predecessor, John McNesby, who stepped down from his post running the FOP last fall.

Krasner and McNesby routinely hurled insults at one another. Krasner often sought to associate McNesby with former President Donald Trump, and McNesby helped the FOP rent billboards, banner-planes, and a Mister Softee truck to attack Krasner as soft-on-crime.

The DA said his experience with Poplar so far has been markedly different.

As an example, he said Poplar approached him and asked him to change the name of his office’s Police Misconduct Database. The database — an initiative Krasner created early in his first term — is designed to flag officers with potential credibility concerns so prosecutors know how and when to disclose that information in court cases, as required by law.

Krasner said Poplar pointed out that not all officers in the database have actually been found guilty of misconduct. Officers who are under investigation might spend weeks or months in the database before being cleared of wrongdoing — but their personnel records would nonetheless have been included in a database labeled as containing instances of misconduct.

“He’s right,” Krasner said of Poplar. “He asked us to change the name … and I thought he had good reasons, so we changed it.”

It’s now called the Brady-Giglio database, Krasner said, named after the ruling that require prosecutors to disclose all relevant evidence to defense lawyers.

The database episode is unlikely to signal a complete détente between the DA and FOP. Krasner’s office is continuing to prosecute officers for crimes including murder in cases the union has fiercely opposed.

Still, Krasner said it was encouraging to have open lines of communication with Poplar, calling him a “trusted collaborator, even if we’re not going to agree on everything.”

The DA’s opinion on McNesby, meanwhile, has not changed. Even as he praised Poplar, Krasner called McNesby “a one stop, nonstop disaster for public safety.” McNesby — who often said the same about Krasner — did not respond to a request for comment.

Poplar, for his part, issued a statement through a spokesperson saying that he and his colleagues have been meeting with “a number of local leaders across our great city including Mayor Parker, members of her cabinet, city council members and District Attorney Krasner.

“We’re proud to advocate on behalf of our hardworking rank-and-file police officers to ensure that they have a seat at the table with these various policy makers,” he said.