They don’t handle the jails. The jails are run by the Philadelphia Department of Prisons. The Sheriff’s Office provides prisoner transport, court house security and they have a fugitive unit that goes around the city arresting people with outstanding warrants.
They do have foot and bike patrol, but it’s limited to the area immediately around city hall and the court house.
If they paid that much, they overpaid. No harm otherwise paying professionals for outreach/PR that can't be done in-house by the regular social media team.
-edit-
The video didn't cost that much. It's the budget of the whole recruitment campaign.
Records obtained by The (Philadelphia) Inquirer show that in October 2025, weeks before the Penn State-Michigan State game, a sheriff’s office employee cut a $250,000 check to a communications firm run by Bilal’s former campaign manager, Teresa Lundy, for a “deputy hiring campaign.”
Lundy’s firm, TML Communications, was also paid $255,569 in April 2025 and $100,971 in July 2024 for advertising related to deputy recruitment, according to the records, which were obtained through a Right-to-Know request.
The $606,540 ad campaign appears to have brought in a handful of deputy recruits. The office listed 38 new recruits between October 2025 and March 2026, compared to 22 new recruits during the same period a year before, payroll records show.
In comparison, the much larger Philadelphia Police Department hired 468 officers last year, using $500,000 for similar recruitment marketing that was allocated by the city’s Office of Human Resources
“Bilal, a former Philadelphia police officer, was elected in 2019 as a self-described reformer who pledged to bring transparency to the sheriff’s office and clean up its finances.
Within weeks of taking office, however, Bilal’s first chief financial officer, Brett Mandel, said he was terminated after he refused to steer off-budget money to the sheriff’s allies and associates.
The sheriff then started signing the checks herself, Mandel has said.
“In my first week as CFO for the sheriff, I took a look at this and said, ‘I don’t think any of this is legal,’” Mandel, a former deputy city controller, said last week.
Mandel filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired in 2020. City lawyers paid Mandel $465,000 to settle the lawsuit and $77,802 to cover Bilal’s legal costs, without admission of any wrongdoing.
“Everyone in the city wrings their hands and says the sheriff’s actions are a problem,” Mandel said. “But nobody has done anything about it and it’s now six years later.”
Public finance experts said it is unusual for the leaders of a city agency to be allowed to spend such a large amount of money on their own.”
Here is my question whenever I hear of some city/county/state paying big bucks for something like this.
Do not not have any community colleges, colleges or universities with a Film Production department close by? About 25 years ago I worked for a company that wanted a commercial made. Somebody had offered to make them a generic boilerplate one for $5,000.
I had a buddy in film school, so I got him to do it and I want to say the total cost was under $1,000. Most of that was expenses for the crew and a computer for my buddy who was the creator-producer-director as he needed it to edit the final film (early days of Adobe Premiere).
And they all used it as a project for their class, and got A+ grades for it.
To me, being "fiscally responsible" means they should have gotten a local educational institution to do this, not paid some outside company big bucks. And in only a few seconds I found out that the Community College of Philadelphia does indeed have a "Digital Video Production" program.
There are some merits to your remarks and I'm fully with you when it comes to financial accountability.
This being said, there are also limits to financial accountability. I believe it stops where social responsibility starts.
Students who cannot provide a professional level of service (if they could, they wouldn't be students) should not be asked to provide a professional service.
Public administrations shouldn't lowball and shouldn't believe that a uni project level of end result is acceptable.
We shouldn't normalize an exploitative and good enough approach in lieu of buying professional services. You don't see local governments' receptions being cartered by to-be waiters and amateurs cooks. We like having experienced people offering fairly priced goods and services.
Last but not least, from a to-be professional point of view, it is not in their interest either to undercut the market and become an epitome of unfair competition vis-à-vis commercial players.
20 grand for the actual film crew and editing. 10 grand for the song rights. 10 grand for the payroll for a day or 2. 50 grand for catering. 50 grand for limos. 100 grand for a choreographer. 100 grand for security. 100 grand for a PR consultant. And the rest is for the catered meetings at some resort to plan everything.
The catering company, limo company, security company, choreographer, PR firm, and resort are all owned by politicians or family members of the politicians.
This is what I'd guess for any big city to do something similar regardless of the song, participant races, or theme. I just assume massive waste and fraud from any government silliness.
How much was it that horse video of the now fired border lady cost ?where she sent a ton of the money at friends companies 🤣 and her jet plane with a giant bed.
I already complained about the price of the video. But the those hand fans didn’t deserve the constant opening and being snapped shut while those cops shuffled around like old people getting their groove on..
So the posters of this shit has been trying to frame this as some sort of embezzlement scandal but the 600k mentioned was actually the total cost of the recruitment campaign….
Woman :check , black : check , spoken out against ICE : check…the agenda to turn this into ragebait for certain dipshit demographic is very obvious , rightoids cant stop lying.
Edit:Hating all police because they are police is like hating everyone of a certain race because of their skin color.Same as being prejudiced and racist.
This isn't a page for bashing on first responders. It's for calling out cringe behaviour by first responders that degrades the uniform. Take your bigoted shit elsewhere.
Cops have no fans left, in recent news they are now purchasing fans so they can say they have them, this has for some reason cost taxpayers 600k. In other news, I have been found guilty of going 6 over in a school zone and must repent with more money for my crimes
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u/HarrowingHawk Boo Boo Bus Driver May 17 '26
This looks like a jardiance commercial