Questionable pay raises at the Sheriff’s Office | Morning Newsletter

You can expect a beautiful spring day with sunny skies and a high of 74.

Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is running for reelection next month. She portrays herself as a reformer who took over an office riddled with mismanagement and lacking basic equipment.

Just last week, she asked City Council for more financial support.

But our lead story reveals that Bilal funded pay raises for her top staff with money that was supposed to be used to hire more deputies.

If you see this 🔑 in today’s newsletter, that means we’re highlighting our exclusive journalism. You need to be a subscriber to read these stories.

— Taylor Allen (@TayImanAllen, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Last week, Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal asked City Council for $2 million in new support for her office, which she described as “consistently underfunded” and “severely short in deputies.”

But city finance records and an internal Sheriff’s Office memo obtained by The Inquirer show Bilal used hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to hire more staff — including deputies — to give hefty raises to her executive staff and other office workers.

She also tried to more than double her own salary. That didn’t work out, but if it had, her salary would’ve been $285,000, making her the highest-paid elected official in Philadelphia.

Reminder: Historically, the office has paid comparatively low salaries to its deputies, today averaging between $55,000 and $65,000.

Keep reading to learn the details of the large pay bumps.

We have a treat for you for National Poetry Month.

Poetry can be hard to define, so we brought in the experts to help us out.

The Inquirer asked local artists — Jaylene Clark Owens, Jovan McKoy, Mary Mance, and Gabriel Ramirez — to perform their own poems and explain four technical aspects of poetry: rhyme, imagery, meter, and structure.

This interactive allows you to tap through to hear each of their explanations and hear some powerful spoken word performances.

Click here to start your day with some art.

It was just last week that four teenagers were issued citations after several hundred gathered in Center City, stroking concerns about an increasingly dangerous and lawless downtown.

Despite the reputation, Center City is one of the safest corners in town. That’s according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.

After conducting extensive interviews and crunching data, researchers did not find much evidence to validate fears about downtown crime in Philly, New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

That isn’t to say the crime – especially gun violence – doesn’t remain elevated in Philadelphia.

But the narrative that shootings or violent crime haunt downtown in a way they did not before the pandemic is just simply not true.

Keep reading to learn why people feel like crime is skyrocketing downtown.

Over the last 26 years, how many babies were named Emily in Pennsylvania?

A) 100,000

B) 30,000

C) 25,000

D) 75,000

Find out if you know the answer.

😋 Reading: Philadelphia Magazine’s “The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan.”

📱 Anticipating: A Reddit AMA with r/philadelphia with reporters Massarah Mikati and Jeff Gammage today at 1 p.m. about their recent report about the proposed Sixers arena, “Downtown Dreams.”

Hint: Sleaford Mods will perform here tonight.

DRAGONS NURTURED

We’ll select a reader at random to shout out here. Send us your own original anagram to unscramble if you’d like. Cheers to Dan Tureck, who correctly guessed Monday’s answer: Chill Moody. Email us if you know the answer.

And that’s it from me. Make the day count. I’ll see you back here in your inbox tomorrow.