The Sheriff of Philadelphia has three jobs.

On May 21, 2019, Rochelle Bilal defeated incumbent Sheriff Jewell Williams in the Democratic primary. Williams had been the subject of sexual harassment lawsuits by three women.

“We’re going to work hard to make sure everybody knows what the sheriff’s office does,” Bilal said that night. “Scandal days are over.”

She was sworn in as Sheriff of the City and County of Philadelphia on January 6, 2020.

Brett Mandel, a former deputy city controller, served as Sheriff Bilal’s first chief financial officer. He lasted about five weeks.

In a whistleblower lawsuit, Mandel said a member of the sheriff’s transition team handed him a folder describing “contract obligations to the sheriff’s allies and associates” and told him to pay those costs from off-budget funds — accounts outside the city’s budgeting process. He refused, questioned what he described as a “slush fund,” and was terminated. He said he was ushered out of the building.

City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart’s office reported that the Sheriff’s Office could not account for at least 101 service firearms — nine long guns, 26 handguns, and 66 other guns — plus 109 guns surrendered in protection-from-abuse cases between 1997 and 2015. The probe, begun in November 2019 after a confidential complaint, described poor recordkeeping, a lack of policies for managing guns, and haphazard storage in boxes, barrels, cabinets, and piles on the floor.

Much of the dysfunction was attributed to prior administrations; former Sheriff Jewell Williams’s office had given the probe “considerable pushback.” Bilal responded that she had implemented new internal audit procedures and weapon-tracking software. In 2023, the controller’s follow-up review still considered 76 service firearms and 109 of the surrendered weapons unaccounted for.

Two more of Bilal’s early senior staff sued her office. Sommer Miller, the former undersheriff and chief legal officer, said she had complained to Bilal “of possible theft in the advertising department, overspending, extreme sexual harassment by the then-chief of staff, and unauthorized expenditures from the proceeds of sheriff’s sales”; in retaliation, the suit contends, Bilal stripped her of most of her responsibilities, and she resigned. Anitra Paris, a former human resources manager, said she was terminated after refusing Bilal’s requests to hire employees without background checks or civil service tests; her suit said Bilal had also asked her to disclose employee medical information, in violation of federal law, and to provide employees’ home addresses.

A spokesperson said the office does not comment on pending litigation involving personnel matters. The city later settled the two federal whistleblower cases for a combined $585,000 — separate from the earlier settlement of former CFO Brett Mandel’s lawsuit.

The Sheriff’s Office awarded a six-year contract to Bid4Assets, an online auction company, to run sheriff sales. There was no competitive bidding; the office proceeded after an internal review. The city Law Department said it “was not involved in the approval or preparation of this contract” — an approval the Home Rule Charter requires.

“There’s a reason why this issue is critically important and why there’s concern there was a no-bid contract done without any oversight or Law Dept approval despite the fact it’s in the city charter,” Councilmember Helen Gym said at the time.

Undersheriff Curtis Douglas, Bilal’s chief legal advisor, announced his retirement a week after reporting revealed the six-year Bid4Assets contract had been issued without Law Department review, in violation of the city charter. “Undersheriff Douglass is currently retiring from decades of public service!” spokesperson Theresa Lundy wrote in an email. “This is great news.”

At a Council hearing, Councilmember Helen Gym had asked Douglas: “You wanted to do a six-year contract because there was an emergency right now?” “That’s correct,” he responded. “We did an extensive vetting process.”

The controversy over the shift to online auctions culminated in a court order suspending sheriff sales through the summer.

Bilal named Tariq El-Shabazz, a former criminal defense attorney, as undersheriff, replacing Curtis Douglas, who had retired weeks earlier after the Bid4Assets contract came to light. El-Shabazz had joined the office earlier in the year as a legal adviser.

As of 2017, El-Shabazz had $190,712 in federal, state, and city tax-lien judgments on file, and his former law firm had been sued six times between 2008 and 2016 over unpaid rent. In 2023, the city’s ethics board fined him $16,000 for operating a private criminal-defense practice while undersheriff; he retired in May 2026, on the day the court ordered an accounting of the office’s sheriff sales.

In June 2021, the City of Philadelphia paid about $465,000 to settle Brett Mandel’s whistleblower lawsuit over his firing. The amount included $77,802 to cover Sheriff Bilal’s legal costs.

The Sheriff’s Office contract with Bid4Assets, the online auction company that runs its property sales, was announced in March 2021. It “circumvented usual bidding procedures and was signed without the involvement of the law department,” the Inquirer reported.

Three months later, Bid4Assets news releases began carrying a new media contact: “Teresa M. Lundy, TML Communications” — Bilal’s former campaign manager, whose firm is the Sheriff’s Office spokesperson. Between June 10, 2021 and June 7, 2022, her name and firm appeared on at least 15 Bid4Assets releases announcing auctions for 12 county governments in four states: Berks, Beaver, Franklin, Carbon and Chester Counties in Pennsylvania; Colusa, Stanislaus, Riverside and Los Angeles Counties in California; Whatcom and Chelan Counties in Washington; and Wadena County, Minnesota. The earliest release found carrying her name is dated June 10, 2021, and the last June 7, 2022; releases located on either side of that window carry Bid4Assets’ own marketing staff as media contact.

Two of the Pennsylvania releases listing her as contact name Philadelphia among the counties for which Bid4Assets conducts sales.

Asked about the arrangement, Lundy said: “TML Communications provides communications services to a large client base, which includes corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Neither I, nor my firm, played any role in any contract at the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office.” Bid4Assets chief executive Jesse Loomis said: “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to comment on that.”

The office hired Michael Paige, a former Philadelphia police officer, as a deputy chief at $100,000 a year. Paige had joined the force in 1990 and accumulated 100 days of suspensions; he was terminated in 2007 after being charged with forcing a man to perform a sex act in Fairmount Park. He was acquitted in criminal court and later lost a civil lawsuit over the incident.

Spokesperson Teresa Lundy declined to discuss the hiring beyond confirming, in an email, that Paige works for the office.

On the morning of March 25, 2022, officers looking for Travys Taylor, 28, on a warrant came to the home of his mother, Tysha Melton. Melton said the officers charged into her home wearing tactical gear, guns in hand, and pushed her into a television stand. Taylor had been killed in October 2021 after leaving a Kensington restaurant; a memorial to him stood in his bedroom. According to the suit, the public court docket had recorded his death at least as early as January 2022.

Melton’s federal lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleged that Bilal’s staff failed to conduct a proper records search before the raid. Spokesperson Teresa Lundy contended there was no mechanism for checking, in advance of a raid, whether someone wanted on a warrant had died.

City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart’s office released a performance audit of the Sheriff’s Office custodial accounts — the bank accounts holding proceeds from mortgage and tax foreclosure sales. The audit covered 2015 through 2019 under Sheriff Jewell Williams and was expanded to include Sheriff Bilal’s first year, 2020.

The audit found the office “does not maintain adequate recordkeeping procedures to account for fee revenue collected,” making it “unlikely that the Sheriff’s Office remits all revenues and fees to the City as required,” and concluded the office was “operating outside of the checks and balances established in the Home Rule Charter to protect taxpayer funds from mismanagement or misuse.”

“The findings in the audit are serious and need immediate attention,” Rhynhart said. “They demonstrate the deeply entrenched problems in the Sheriff’s Office, problems that Sheriff Bilal inherited from the Sheriffs before her.”

In April 2023, Sheriff Bilal appeared before City Council seeking nearly $2 million in new support for an office she described as “consistently underfunded” and “severely short in deputies.” Her budget director, Craig Martin, told Council: “It’s a money shortage and a body shortage,” saying the office needed the money to fill 79 vacant deputy jobs.

Records showed Bilal had “recently diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to hire more uniformed staff — including deputies — to fund hefty raises for her executive staff and other office workers,” the Inquirer’s Ryan W. Briggs and William Bender reported. In September 2022, finance officials authorized $506,000 in pay increases for the office’s exempt staff.

Bilal also sought to more than double her $136,083 salary. The proposed 109% raise would have brought it to $285,000, making her the highest-paid elected official in Philadelphia; city charter provisions barred it, and she received a 5% raise, to $142,751, under the charter’s cap on yearly raises for elected officials. At the hearing, Councilmember Jim Harrity told her: “We need to give you more respect, and give you guys more money.”

Three current Sheriff’s Office staffers told Philadelphia Magazine that FBI agents contacted them in April 2023, each multiple times, about Bilal’s “spending, hiring practices, and managerial actions” — including payments for a holiday party at Chickie’s & Pete’s, the account used to pay for it, her proposal to more than double her own salary, contract bids, and the office’s discontinuation of Teleosoft, the financial-monitoring software it had used since 2015. Former CFO Brett Mandel was separately questioned in March 2020, after his firing.

The FBI, as is standard practice, neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an investigation. Spokesperson Teresa Lundy declined to comment on whether staff had been contacted or why Teleosoft was discontinued. No charges or other public outcome from the questioning had been reported as of August 2026.

Serving court orders is among the Sheriff’s Office’s duties. Between January 2020 and June 2023, the office received notice of 10,028 protection orders requiring the surrender of weapons; deputies marked just 13% of those cases as completed, according to Pennsylvania State Police data. The four suburban collar counties completed 45% to 61% of theirs in the same period.

“They never went to his property. They never went to take his gun,” said Whitney Brown, who had obtained a protection order. Marcella Nyachogo of Lutheran Settlement House said: “You can kill someone in less than 24 hours.”

Sheriff Bilal requested 72 hours to answer the Inquirer’s questions, then declined to comment.

A follow-up review by the City Controller’s office concluded that 76 service firearms and 109 weapons surrendered under Protection From Abuse orders — 185 firearms in total — remained unaccounted for, defined in the report as “missing without sufficient documentation as to their whereabouts.” A 2020 investigation had originally identified 101 missing service firearms; the office produced sufficient evidence for 25 of them.

Thirty-six of the guns appeared on a list in a folder labeled “WEAPONS BURN LIST,” with no documentation of any specific disposal event. The report recommended that the remaining weapons be entered into the national crime database as missing, and noted that “incarcerated former Sheriff John Green should turn over the gun assumed to be in his possession.”

Sheriff Bilal disputed the review, calling its contents “misleading statements.” Her office’s statement said: “Simply put, we cannot answer inconsistencies that derive as a result of that recordkeeping in the past.”

The Sheriff’s Office debuted a mascot, Deputy Sheriff Justice, at the Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 23, 2023. The office said the character was created to “reach school age children in a more comprehensive and engaging way.”

William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs of The Inquirer later reported that the costume was paid for with two checks totaling $9,250 to Pierre’s Mascots & Costumes, drawn on the office’s off-budget fee-revenue account. That purchase is included in the nearly $2 million in discretionary purchases documented in the April 2024 entry; it is not listed separately in the money ledger.

Tax sales — auctions of tax-delinquent properties — stopped in March 2020 with the pandemic, briefly resumed with online auctions in April 2021, and then stopped again. By the end of 2023 the office had not held one in more than two and a half years, and the city was owed roughly $170 million in back taxes, an increase of nearly $40 million since 2019. Asked why, “Sheriff Rochelle Bilal and her staff won’t say,” the Inquirer reported; a lawyer’s statement confirmed only that tax sales “have not occurred since April of 2021.”

In January 2024, Bilal and the new Parker administration traded blame in dueling statements. Since January 2022, the city had gone to court over roughly 1,330 tax-delinquent properties. The sales resumed in July 2024 under a new, Law Department-approved contract.

Sheriff Bilal’s campaign website listed dozens of news stories under the heading “Record of Accomplishments,” with purported publication dates, attributed to the Inquirer, NBC10, WHYY, and CBS3. None could be found in those outlets’ archives. William Bender of The Inquirer and Futurism each counted 31 headlines; the Associated Press reported “more than 30.”

The campaign removed the stories after Bender reported on them, and issued a statement: “Our campaign provided the outside consultant talking points which were then provided to the AI service. It is now clear that the artificial intelligence service generated fake news articles to support the initiatives that were part of the AI prompt.”

The list ended with a disclaimer that the information “makes no representations or warranties of any kind” about its accuracy.

Tax sheriff sales — auctions of tax-delinquent properties, one of the office’s three core functions — had been paused for roughly three years following the Bid4Assets contract dispute. In her March 2024 budget address, Mayor Cherelle Parker put the cost of the pause at an estimated $35 million in tax revenue for the city and school district. In the same address, she asked City Council to give the sheriff “a huge round of applause.”

The auctions resumed in July 2024, after the Parker administration reached an agreement with Bilal to sign a new contract with Bid4Assets — this time with the Law Department’s approval. The first auction in more than three years sold 29 properties.

An Inquirer investigation by William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs analyzed 17 months of bank records obtained through Right-to-Know requests. It identified nearly $3.2 million flowing into a TD Bank account controlled by the sheriff called “Operation Cost Payable”; the reporters tracked nearly $2 million paid out by checks covering more than 700 discretionary purchases.

Among them: about $40,000 to companies supplying branded merchandise such as backpacks, polo shirts, and fidget spinners; $20,000 toward food and catering, including a $6,600 party at Chickie’s & Pete’s; $8,000 for professional DJs and other entertainment; a $23,000 check to Staples Promotional Products two months before the general election; Rochelle Bilal trading cards; and the mascot costume. The account also funded law-enforcement expenses, including $276,000 for Tasers and $118,000 for ammunition and tactical gear.

The city’s Home Rule Charter defines fee revenue as public money to be turned over to city coffers and allocated through the annual budget process; the 2022 controller’s audit and a Law Department opinion both found this spending violated it. The Sheriff’s Office called the reporting “racist, sexist, anti-community, and libelous.”

Recording a deed after a Philadelphia sheriff sale used to take around six to eight weeks. An Inquirer analysis of more than 130 deeds recorded between October 2023 and March 2024 found their auctions had been held, on average, just over 200 days earlier — about seven months, or more.

City records traced the change: the number of deeds received from the sheriff “plummeted almost immediately” after the office’s old records-management software went offline in April 2023, when the office jettisoned the Teleosoft records software in place since the Williams administration — the same software discontinuation FBI agents had asked staffers about that spring, according to Philadelphia Magazine. One buyer who purchased at auction in November 2023 said the deed was supposed to transfer within 60 to 90 days; it took seven months.

Spokesperson Teresa Lundy said: “Those individuals who have not received deeds should contact our office and we can further explain why their deeds were not processed in a timely fashion.” Bilal did not respond to requests for comment.

State Rep. Jared Solomon, a Democrat from Northeast Philadelphia, wrote to Common Pleas Court President Judge Nina Wright Padilla, describing himself as “deeply concerned by the substantial, publicly documented deficiencies and unacceptable backlogs” at the Sheriff’s Office. He asked the court to “consider taking any actions you deem appropriate and necessary to bring consistency and stability to the Sheriff’s office.”

Solomon suggested an evidentiary hearing to “document the office’s current deficiencies,” after which, he wrote, “the president judge might then consider initiating contempt proceedings against the sheriff of Philadelphia.”

Bilal’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Reporting published the following year by The Inquirer’s Ryan W. Briggs and William Bender reconstructed the crash. On the morning of August 10, 2024, a 2024 Ford Expedition assigned to the Sheriff’s Office ran a red light at 57th Street and Cedar Avenue in West Philadelphia, with police-style emergency lights and sirens activated, and was struck by a car that had a green light. Witnesses described the driver as a young man in a white tank top, not a deputy, who left the scene holding a dog that neighbors said appeared to be a poodle. The Expedition was totaled; the city estimated the damage at $38,444.60.

Three days later, a stolen-vehicle report was filed for the Expedition. The complainant is listed in the report as a Jane Doe. Property records show the address on the report is a home owned by Nicole J. Nobles, a top deputy in the Sheriff’s Office. A police spokesperson said directives requiring a complainant’s license and registration were not followed.

Sheriff Bilal’s office said: “We do not investigate stolen vehicles or vehicle accidents. The Philadelphia Police Department is leading this investigation.” As of November 2025, no charges had been filed.

Court security is one of the office’s three core functions. In 2023, the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts tracked 72 security incidents in city courts — a nearly threefold increase from the 25 logged in 2019, the year before Bilal took office — and 2024 was on pace to be higher, with 59 reported through mid-September. Incidents at the Criminal Justice Center and the city’s four other court buildings were being reported at a rate of about six per month.

The shortage of deputies delayed trials. Some jailed defendants waited for hours in the Criminal Justice Center’s basement, only to be driven back to prison because a deputy failed to transport them to the courtroom, according to an assistant chief of the Defender Association. One judge described the situation as an “emergency situation”; another called it a “disaster waiting to happen.”

As of the article’s publication, the office had 253 deputy sheriffs against a budgeted level of 307. Bilal had not responded to the Inquirer’s requests for comment over two weeks.

ING Properties, a Virginia-based investor and lender to commercial developers, sued the Sheriff’s Office over its failure to transfer deeds. The firm had become the owner of six properties after the development project it financed fell through and no one bid at the June 4 sheriff sale; nearly four months later, it had received none of the deeds. An attorney representing mortgage-servicing companies said a deed from a September 2023 sale had arrived only the month before — about eleven months after the auction.

When the Inquirer first reported the delays in July, the office’s spokesperson had responded by email: “You insist there is a widespread delay, but that is incorrect.” Days later, presented with city records, the office reversed course and acknowledged it was wrong, blaming an unspecified staffing issue.

The Administrative Governing Board of the First Judicial District — the panel of judges that oversees Philadelphia court operations — issued an order finding that “the proper administration of justice in the Courts of the First Judicial District has been — and will continue to be — threatened due to the Philadelphia Sheriff Office’s systemic failures to properly staff courtrooms and court facilities.”

The order gave Bilal 90 days to resolve the problems and 30 days to submit a corrective action plan. It required the office to address prisoner-transportation failures, to place at least one deputy in every criminal, family, and traffic courtroom, and to add security at less-sensitive court facilities.

“The emotional cost to victims’ and defendants’ families waiting for hours for their opportunities to give victim impact testimony or address the court is unquantifiable,” Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott said.

City rules require crashes involving city-leased vehicles to be reported to the Department of Fleet Services. The Sheriff’s Office did not report the August 2024 crash until January 2025 — five months later — and Fleet Services learned of it when someone at the Sheriff’s Office requested a replacement vehicle.

Sheriff Bilal said she did not learn until January that no one in her chain of command had reported the incident. A police corporal said: “We’re doing an internal investigation now into what happened, and why those notifications weren’t made.”

To meet the judges’ 90-day courthouse-security deadline, the Sheriff’s Office reassigned the deputies who had provided security at the Adult Probation and Parole Department to Family Court. The First Judicial District then directed that probation check-ins shift to video, suspended in-person drug screening, restricted the main probation office at 714 Market Street to employees only, and moved ankle-monitor removals to defendants’ homes.

“You’re saying probation doesn’t have any security?” Judge Roxanne Covington asked. A court official described the implementation: “We’re building the plane as we’re flying it.” Judge Benjamin Lerner said that “subbing in-person probation officer meetings with virtual meetings is definitely not going to increase the effectiveness of probation supervision.”

Bilal and her office did not respond to requests for comment, and had not answered the Inquirer’s inquiries since the previous summer. In September 2024, her office’s statement had called the paper’s courthouse-security reporting a “pattern of fearmongering” and described it as akin to yelling “fire in a non-burning building.”

Three months after its December order, the Administrative Governing Board of the First Judicial District issued a second order, holding that Bilal had failed to fully comply with the December directive and that the deputy shortage had resulted in “direct harm to the proper functioning and safe operation and administration of the courts.”

The order gave the sheriff 30 days to produce plans to boost deputy recruitment — including creating a sheriff’s academy within city limits — to restore staffing at the probation office, and to report on unfilled but budgeted deputy positions and the recruitment efforts made to fill them.

The day before the order, Bilal’s campaign, Friends of Rochelle Bilal, sent supporters a fundraising email blaming the judges: “The very people demanding more security protection are the ones creating the hostile environment in the first place.” Bilal and her spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the order.

The March 2025 court order required a plan to boost deputy recruitment; the office pledged a compliance plan within 30 days and argued a local academy would enhance hiring, noting that recruits currently train for 19 weeks in State College, “an obstacle that many local families simply cannot accommodate.”

In May 2025, Bilal proposed leasing a former Social Security Administration building at 2929 North Broad Street as an academy — at an estimated $800,000 to $900,000 a year — and moving headquarters to 40,000 square feet in the former Budd Company complex on West Hunting Park Avenue. Council President Kenyatta Johnson responded: “We’re going to look at those vacancies in calculations with what you’re actually requesting funding for.”

At the April 2026 budget hearing, nearly a year later, Bilal was still asking Council for funding to open a local training academy.

A sheriff’s deputy’s take-home vehicle — an unmarked Dodge Charger equipped with emergency lights and a siren — was stolen. It was last seen in late September, parked on the 500 block of South 63rd Street.

It was the office’s second lost take-home vehicle in fourteen months. At the time the theft was reported, the August 2024 Expedition crash remained unresolved at fifteen months, with no charges filed and the driver never disclosed. “There is no new information I can provide at this time,” spokesperson Teresa Lundy said by email. A police spokesperson said the Expedition investigation remained open; the sheriff’s spokesperson declined to comment on the Charger.

The Sheriff’s Office released a two-year report on its own performance at a union training center. “This report is more than a collection of statistics,” Bilal said. “It is a story of progress, resilience, accountability and results.”

The report said the office had expanded eviction capacity from about 25 weekly actions to about 144 since taking over evictions in August 2024, that fugitive apprehensions were up 75% over two years, and that task-force operations had removed more than 300 firearms from the streets. Of evictions, Bilal said: “Our Civil Division served more than 15,000 eviction actions … and no one got shot.”

At a news conference with District Attorney Larry Krasner, held in response to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Sheriff Bilal said of ICE agents: “If any want to come in this city and commit a crime, you will not be able to hide, nobody will whisk you off. You don’t want this smoke, cause we will bring it to you.” She called ICE “fake, wannabe law enforcement” and said, “No law enforcement professional wears a mask.”

The next day, after the police department was flooded with calls, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel issued a statement: the Sheriff’s Office is “a separate entity from the Philadelphia Police Department” and does “not conduct criminal investigations, nor does it in any way direct municipal policing.” He added: “clear lines of authority — and accurate public representation of those roles — are essential to maintaining public trust and effective public safety operations.”

The following week, at a press conference at Salt and Light Church in Kingsessing, Bilal elaborated on the remark. “That’s the smoke,” she said, referring to holding anyone who commits a crime in the city accountable.

Amos Financial, an Illinois-based debt-acquisition firm, moved for sanctions: it bought a property at auction in May 2024 and had yet to receive the deed. “For approximately two years since the sheriff’s sale,” its filing said, “plaintiff is still paying ongoing taxes and preservation costs to protect the property without the benefit of legally possessing the property.”

JSB Property Group, a New Jersey-based firm, sued after paying nearly $1 million for eight properties and having its “repeated requests” to begin ownership transfers ignored, its filing said. Between January and March, the city recorded 185 sheriff-sale deeds, against 180 in the same period of 2025; the Inquirer’s 2024 analysis had found just 29 deeds submitted in February and March of that year, nearly all corresponding to auctions held 200 to 300 days earlier. “This problem is unique to Philadelphia, and it is an embarrassment,” wrote JSB’s attorney, Daniel Bernheim.

The sheriff’s office and the city’s Law Department declined to comment.

At the same April 28 budget hearing where she testified that sheriff sales were going “full blast,” Bilal asked City Council to allocate $54.9 million to her office for the coming fiscal year — a 54% increase over its current $35.5 million budget, the largest percentage increase sought by any city agency. “We need staffing. We need funding,” she said. Sheriff deed transfers were down 76% year to date compared with 2019, according to city real estate records.

The hearing’s reception was largely warm. Councilmembers praised Bilal’s office; Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. credited its response during the 2020 civil unrest, and Councilmember Cindy Bass observed: “If you read some of the daily publications, you’d think the sheriff’s department was going to hell in a handbasket.”

At a City Council budget hearing on April 28, 2026, presenting a $19.3 million budget request, Sheriff Bilal testified that the deed-processing problems that began in 2023 had been fixed, and that sheriff sales were going “full blast.” Reporting by The Inquirer’s William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs documented buyers who said the problems persisted, including waits of a year or more for deeds to properties they had paid for.

Of buyers who said otherwise, she told Councilmember Cindy Bass: “If you believe them that run to the newspaper — ‘Oh I ain’t got my deed’ — well they never tell them they didn’t pay the invoice.”

Fifteen days later, a Common Pleas Court judge ordered her to account for every sheriff sale of her tenure.

An Inquirer analysis of bank records by Ryan W. Briggs and William Bender found that the sheriff’s office made nearly $8 million in purchases from the “Operation Cost Payable” fee account between March 2024 and October 2025 — a separate, later period than the roughly $2 million the reporters had tracked from the same account for October 2022 through February 2024.

Among the largest checks: $250,000 in October 2025, $255,569 in April 2025, and $100,971 in July 2024, totaling $606,540, to TML Communications, a firm run by Teresa Lundy, Bilal’s former campaign manager, for a “deputy hiring campaign” — including a 30-second television ad, featuring Bilal dancing, that aired during a November Penn State-Michigan State football broadcast. Bilal and Lundy would not comment on the new expenditures.

Common Pleas Court Judge Paula Patrick, supervisor of the court’s commerce division, signed an order requiring Sheriff Bilal to submit a detailed accounting of every sheriff sale since she took office in January 2020, along with a plan for “promptly” handling post-sale payments and delivering deeds to winning bidders. The order stated that the office “appears not to be timely performing non-discretionary duties mandated by law.”

The order also required Bilal or a representative to appear at a public hearing to demonstrate why a special master, title agent, or someone with similar real estate expertise should not be brought in. A 2003 consent order already required the office to process deeds within 40 days of settlement.

Undersheriff Tariq El-Shabazz retired from his $200,000-a-year position effective May 13, 2026 — the same day Judge Patrick’s order was signed. The office’s statement, released the following day, described “the conclusion of his distinguished service to the City of Philadelphia.”

In 2023, the city’s ethics board had fined El-Shabazz $16,000 after he acknowledged operating a private legal practice representing criminal defendants being prosecuted by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, in violation of city ethics rules.

Sheriff Bilal announced a reorganization of the office on June 8, 2026, aimed at reducing deed-processing delays, including a planned public “deed tracker” for winning bidders and the hiring of an undersheriff whose identity her spokesperson did not immediately confirm.

The undersheriff was later identified by The Inquirer’s Ryan W. Briggs and William Bender as George Gossett Jr. Their reporting found that in April 2026, two months before his hire, Bilal’s own office had auctioned off a North Philadelphia rowhouse Gossett owned, following years of missed mortgage payments and unpaid-utility liens; a $50,000 mortgage from 2007 had grown to a $78,000 judgment by March 2025, and the property sold for about $58,000.

The same report found that the office’s new deputy chief financial officer and project manager, William Brownlee Sr., had lost two properties to private lenders at sheriff’s sale, most recently in 2024. A bankruptcy filing in November 2025 disclosed $5.3 million in liabilities, including nearly $1.5 million owed to the IRS.

During the Phillies’ HBCU Celebration night against the Marlins, the team honored Sheriff Bilal on-field as the night’s “Toyota Hometown Hero” — a program recognizing local military personnel, community leaders, and public servants. She wore a Bryce Harper jersey and swung an honorary bat; the stadium’s big screen noted she was the first African American woman elected sheriff in the office’s history.

A week later, she was in Judge Paula Patrick’s courtroom.

An Inquirer analysis by William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs of the sheriff’s office’s financial records found that twenty-two TD Bank checking accounts managed by the office “contained a combined $39 million at the end of May 2024,” and that “by last August, that sum had swollen to $130 million.” The majority, the article reported, “flowed into a business account earmarked for money from mortgage foreclosure sales.” Statements showed the office “generated more than $3 million in interest between 2024 and 2025.”

The article attributed the balances to the pace of distribution: the proceeds of sales “are sitting for long periods in TD Bank accounts the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office controls, rather than being used to quickly settle old tax and utility liens.” After all liens are settled, any excess funds are owed to the former homeowner. David Denenberg, an attorney who seeks to collect those funds, said the office’s system for distributing sale proceeds is worse than ever, and questioned the propriety of the office generating millions of dollars in interest by holding them. “They’re making money on other people’s money,” Denenberg said. “They should be helping you, if you’re the purchaser or the one who lost their home. You shouldn’t have to flood the courts with this litigation.”

Sheriff Bilal moved for a protective order to avoid testifying at the special-master hearing. Her attorney argued that sheriff sales — one of the office’s three core functions — are “not within her unique personal knowledge.”

Judge Paula Patrick denied the motion the same morning, writing that “Bilal and any other relevant parties shall appear” the following day and would “be expected to testify if necessary.”

The sheriff’s office published a statement responding to the Inquirer’s August 25 article, headlined “After six years of chaos in Philly Sheriff’s Office, Rochelle Bilal must answer to judges.” Bilal wrote that “since the advertising relationship between the Sheriff’s Office and The Inquirer changed, the newspaper has lost more than $5 million annually in advertising revenue previously associated with this office,” and that “since then, its attacks on the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office—and on me personally—have been relentless.” She added: “Financial context alone does not invalidate legitimate reporting, and no public official should be beyond scrutiny.”

The reporting that documented those payments examined the office’s advertising spending. “Sheriff sale ads: A bonanza for the politically connected in Philly,” by Craig R. McCoy and Jeremy Roebuck, ran on April 27, 2018, under Sheriff Jewell Williams; Bilal was sworn in in January 2020. Three days after it published, Philadelphia Media Network publisher and CEO Terry Egger wrote to readers that the company would run a paid Sheriff’s Office advertising section, which its advertising and marketing departments had begun working on in December 2017, without taking payment for it: “We absolutely do not want to potentially benefit if any portion of the advertising/marketing section is being funded through the very means being called into question today.”

The statement also said the office’s Home Asset Recovery Team initiative has returned “approximately $8.3 million to individuals and families entitled to” excess sheriff-sale proceeds, “more than any previous Sheriff administration ever has,” and that staffing and deed-processing work had begun before the court’s order requiring it. The $8.3 million figure was published by the office itself in April 2024, in sponsored content credited to her in City & State Pennsylvania: “$8,312,647.28” for 2020 through 2023, set against “$3,715,815.66” returned “during the 2015-2019 administration.” In April 2017, the Philadelphia Sunday Sun, reporting on Williams’s City Council budget testimony, wrote that the office’s Defendant Asset Recovery Team had returned “nearly $11 million” to “more than 400 people” since 2012.

On the money held between a sale and a payout, the statement said: “Our office generates NO INTEREST because the funds provided must be escheated to the state pursuant to the Disposition of Abandoned and Unclaimed Property Act (DAUPA).” The August 25 article reported that statements showed the office “generated more than $3 million in interest between 2024 and 2025.”

Sheriff Bilal appeared before Common Pleas Court Judge Paula Patrick at a hearing on whether a special master should be appointed over the office’s processing of deeds after sheriff sales, under a 2003 consent order requiring deeds within 40 days of settlement. The judge imposed six months of outside supervision of sheriff sales: Bilal’s staff agreed to allow an outside person or group to monitor how auctions are conducted and report back to the court. The judge did not name the overseer or say when the supervision would begin.

At the hearing, deputy undersheriff Steven Wakefield acknowledged the office had withheld thousands of pages of records. Bilal, in civilian dress, sat silently before the judge and did not respond when asked by an Inquirer reporter for comment. Afterward, she said: “It’s better that we come together and make an agreement so we can continue working forward.”

“My order was very specific,” Patrick said of her May directive, which required a detailed accounting of all sales proceeds received and disbursed since January 2020. Daniel Bernheim, a lawyer for JSB Property Group, the real estate investment company whose March lawsuit alleged breach of the consent order, said: “This is in essence exactly what we were asking for.”

Undersheriff George Gossett Jr. resigned effective Friday, September 11, 2026, three months after Bilal hired him. He confirmed the resignation to The Inquirer’s William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs, who reported it on September 15. Gossett said through a spokesperson that he is “excited to pursue opportunities in the private sector” and provided no other explanation. Bilal and her spokesperson, Teresa Lundy, declined to provide any details about why he left. The Inquirer reported that sources in the office said the pair “did not see eye-to-eye.”

Gossett, a Roxborough-based lawyer and former assistant district attorney, was hired in June at an annual salary of $185,000, weeks after a Common Pleas Court judge ordered Bilal to fix the sheriff sale process or face consequences. The office’s June 8 release announcing the “reorganization and modernization” plan said the new undersheriff would “oversee daily operations, strategic planning initiatives, personnel management, and operational coordination across the agency.” He is the fourth undersheriff to serve Bilal since she took office in 2020. Sommer Miller resigned in August 2020, seven months into the job; Curtis Douglas left in May 2021; Tariq El-Shabazz retired in May 2026.

The same report said Bilal had fired Mark Wilson, the office’s codirector of real estate, the previous week. Wilson declined to comment. As of September 15, the outside monitor for the six months of supervision of sheriff sales imposed in August had not been appointed.

At a two-day hearing before Common Pleas Court Judge Paula Patrick that began September 30, 2026, deputy undersheriff Steven Wakefield, hired in June, testified that an internal audit had found about $20 million in sheriff-sale proceeds for which “checks had not been written,” including uncollected property taxes and water bills meant to be recouped through sheriff sales. “A lot of that was money that was supposed to go to the city,” Wakefield said. The Inquirer’s William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs reported that the sum is more than half the office’s annual budget. The audit has so far gone back only as far as August 2025. Wakefield did not explain why the money had remained in the office and said it had recently been transferred to the city. Judge Patrick asked why the information was not in the records she had ordered the office to produce over the summer.

The hearing came as Bilal and her staff sought to back out of the agreement reached in August, under which Bilal’s staff agreed to allow an outside entity to monitor the auctions and report back to the court in six months. According to Daniel Bernheim, the lawyer for plaintiff JSB Property Group, the office proposed changes to the judge’s draft order that included 48 hours’ notice before the supervisor could interview any employee, removal of the word “comprehensive” before “review,” and automatic termination of the supervision after six months regardless of whether any improvements are made. Jonathan Rardin, a lawyer the city retained to represent Bilal, argued in a memo that the 2003 consent order requiring deeds within 40 days of settlement does not apply to Bilal because it was brought against a previous sheriff, John Green, and that the court’s authority was in any case limited to holding her in contempt.

When her testimony continued on October 1, Bilal was asked whether she would permit an outside compliance examiner to confirm that sheriff sales had been fixed. She did not answer the question. “We are in compliance,” she said. “We got control of this.”