PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is vigorously defending her office, one day after a city controller report claimed that some 80 guns reported missing from her office three years ago are still missing.
Bilal says her office located all but 20 of 101 guns designated as missing in a 2020 controller’s report. She said she sent the controller a 159-page report in June, detailing the effort to trace each gun and concluding that 58 were found, 18 were destroyed and three were double-counted.
Bilal suggested that the controller’s motivation for revisiting the report now, as she’s running for her second term, is political.
“You draw your own inferences,” she told reporters at a press conference at her office. “This is September. The election’s in November. Now you tell me, is it a political move?”
Acting Controller Charles Edacheril is not seeking the office permanently. A spokesperson said only that the office stands by its report, released Wednesday, that 80 guns are still missing. The report said the documentation the Sheriff provided did not definitively show most of the guns had been found.
“There is no definitive way to say that firearms are missing,” Bilal countered, blaming the controversy on the bad record-keeping of previous sheriffs going back to the 1970s.
To underscore the point, she showed two sets of slides: the armory when she took office in 2020, with boxes and files sitting around haphazardly, and the armory now, with neat stacks of containers and security features including motion-activated cameras.
“If the controller would have done their job 10 years ago and audit that office, maybe it wouldn’t have been in that condition when I took office and there would be no presumption of missing guns,” she said. “They keep putting it on this administration. How about their responsibility to be the auditor of this city? But they failed in their responsibility to audit that, because that’s what I came into.”
The original audit began one day after Bilal took office. The controller’s chief of staff, Lief Erickson, said Wednesday that Edacheril decided to revisit the missing guns after Bilal’s budget testimony before City Council last spring, when she first asserted that all but 20 of the reported missing guns had been found. He said the office hoped the sheriff would report the 80 guns it still considers missing to the National Crime Information Center’s database.
Undersheriff Tariq El-Shabazz explained in detail why he thinks that would actually be the wrong thing to do. He said it could result in innocent gun owners being accused of illegal possession through a complex scenario where a theoretical ex-sheriff might have given a gun considered missing to a blood relative who is licensed to carry.
Bilal said she is satisfied that the guns the controller cites are not a public safety threat but added her internal affairs unit continues to investigate, including tracking down retired sheriffs who may still have guns on the list of the missing.
Bilal says she has followed all of the recommendations the controller made in the 2020 report and could verify the whereabouts of every weapon that has come into the armory since she took office.
“We are moving forward,” she said. “I came here to fix things.”