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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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, the Inquirer later reported. In this site’s running cost total, that purchase is counted once, within the fee-account spending reported in April 2024.

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. The Inquirer and Futurism counted 31 headlines; the Associated Press reported “more than 30.”

The campaign removed the stories after the Inquirer 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 analysis of 17 months of bank records, obtained through Right-to-Know requests, identified nearly $3.2 million flowing into a TD Bank account controlled by the sheriff called “Operation Cost Payable.” 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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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 — winning bidders waiting a year or more for deeds to properties they had paid for — had been fixed, and that sheriff sales were going “full blast.”

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.

The sheriff’s office made nearly $8 million in purchases from the “Operation Cost Payable” fee account between March 2024 and October 2025, according to an Inquirer analysis of bank records — a separate, later period than the roughly $2 million the paper 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.” 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 named as George Gossett Jr. 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 office’s new deputy chief financial officer and project manager, William Brownlee Sr., has 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.

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.”

Sheriff Bilal was due to appear before Judge Paula Patrick to explain why the court should not appoint a special master over the office’s processing of deeds after sheriff sales. The hearing concerns potential violations of a 2003 consent order requiring deeds to be issued within 40 days of settlement.

This entry will be updated when the outcome is reported.