Larry Krasner, a left-wing civil rights lawyer, has won the Democratic primary for (and thus almost certainly the office of) Philadelphia district attorney. This is a very big deal: one of the city’s most high-profile critics of the criminal justice system will now have a leading role in administrating and, hopefully, transforming it.

Philadelphia is the city where the former DA Lynne Abraham, dubbed “the deadliest DA” for her zealous embrace of the death penalty (though no one she sent to death row was ever actually executed), ran the office for nineteen years.

It’s the city where police-chief-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo reigned throughout the 1970s, a human embodiment of reactionary backlash politics with a reputation for meting out beatings as a rank-and-file cop and who took glee in a public strip search of Black Panthers. He reportedly once pledged to make “Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”