Republican emphasis on city crime, according to Philadelphia District Attorney Krasner, is “racist rhetoric.”

Larry Krasner, the district attorney for Philadelphia, asserted Friday morning from the Pennsylvania State Capitol that Republicans’ emphasis on city crime in the run-up to the November midterm elections amounts to “racist rhetoric.”

During a press conference on the Capitol steps to address the state House Select Committee’s inquiry into his office and its application of criminal law, Krasner, 61, made the remarks.

The committee had asked him to speak under oath privately, without access to the public, and behind closed doors, but the progressive DA claimed he refused.

‘Because this political stunt ostensibly involves matters of very significant and very important public concern and because the votes cast by Philadelphians in overwhelming numbers in two elections are at stake,’ Krasner claimed, the committee denied his requests to testify and respond to questions at a public hearing.

Police in Philadelphia are looking for a murder suspect who had previously been cleared of a 2012 murder conviction.

The Republican party policy, according to Krasner, is to “point a finger at large, diverse cities and say large, diverse cities are lawless,” thus she said that Republican legislators were ignoring the rising crime in their own districts in favor of Philadelphia.

You’ve heard that before, right? Before relating Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign promise to combat “lawlessness” in “one enormous, diversified city after another,” Krasner posed the question.

What we see in this case, according to Krasner, is the same old playbook of coded and racial language. “It’s about condemning the biggest city in Pennsylvania with the most diverse population for having the same national challenge that we have with gun violence elsewhere and even having rises that are fewer the committee’s counties,” the author of the essay claims.

“This procedure has no integrity,” he continued. If there was, they would examine the overall state and consider some practical answers and things that might be done to improve it, and I would join them and assist them along the way.

After Krasner disobeyed subpoenas that the House Select Committee issued in August, the Pennsylvania House voted last month that he should be punished in contempt. The committee claimed that Krasner turned down hand-delivered subpoenas twice, and that his attorneys declared they would not abide by an electronic subpoena.