FOP president falsely claims Inquirer sought ‘private’ funeral records

A political campaign account for Roosevelt Poplar, the president of Philadelphia’s police union, falsely accused The Inquirer in a social media post Thursday of demanding “private financial information” about funerals for fallen officers.

Team Poplar — 2025 — a Facebook account that represents Poplar and his executive team, who are mired in a contentious campaign to retain control of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 — wrote that the union received a Right to Know request filed by Inquirer reporter Barbara Laker, asking how much city money was spent on the funerals of police officers who died in the line of duty since 2005, and the names of those officers.

“This request wasn’t about transparency or accountability — it was a direct attack,” part of the post read. “... they wanted to put a price tag on our heroes.”

Laker, however, did not send any information requests to the FOP.

On Aug. 29, she submitted a Right to Know request to the city’s law department and the mayor’s office, seeking a copy of the city’s policy on paying for officers’ funerals, along with an annual accounting of how much taxpayer money has been spent on such services.

It’s unclear how the FOP obtained a copy of Laker’s Right to Know request. Poplar, through a Lodge 5 spokesperson, declined to comment.

In an email, Joe Grace, a spokesperson for Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, wrote that the city “has not shared the RTK request with anyone or any external organization.” Grace declined to answer whether the city would try to determine how a public records request sent to city officials wound up with Poplar.

For much of 2025, Lodge 5 has been consumed by internal disputes about the union’s finances.

Charles “Knute” Mellon, a former pilot in the police department’s aviation unit, is running to unseat Poplar in an October election. Mellon and others, including Kenneth Rossiter, a former homicide unit detective, have accused Poplar and his predecessor, John McNesby, of racking up millions of dollars in questionable credit card charges, and lacking transparency about profits and expenses that have been derived from businesses that the FOP operates, including a bar and a catering business.

A recent Inquirer investigation, The Blue Divide, found FOP expenditures that independent tax and labor law experts said pointed to limited oversight and were difficult to decipher.

Red flags were most notable within the Survivors’ Fund, a charitable foundation the FOP created to support families of officers who lost their lives or were gravely wounded in the line of duty.

An Inquirer examination of public tax records from 2016 to 2024 found that the FOP reported spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on “funerals and special events” during years when there were no line-of-duty deaths.

In 2016, the charitable foundation reported $572,520 in expenditures, including $350,831 on “survivor memorial services for families of police officers killed on duty.” Just one officer died that year of police-related health woes: Raymond Diaz.

Poplar canceled an interview that The Inquirer had scheduled with him before the publication of The Blue Divide. He also did not respond directly to detailed questions that reporters emailed about the union’s expenses.

After the publication of that story, five police sources told The Inquirer that the city often pays at least some portion of funeral expenses for fallen officers. In search of more clarity on this issue, Laker filed the records request with the city.

In the Facebook post, Team Poplar pivoted from misrepresenting Laker’s request to attacking Mellon and his supporters, accusing them of undermining Lodge 5, and dragging “grieving families into their dirty political games.”

Mellon responded in a separate Facebook post, writing that the union was “trying to distract from the real issues — ballooning spending, unanswered questions about finances, lack of transparency, and an executive board that refuses to be held accountable to its members."

He added that reporters routinely file Right to Know requests.

“That’s journalism,” Mellon wrote, “not a conspiracy.”

» READ MORE: Click here to read the full Inquirer investigation into the FOP’s finances