Because liberal cultural elitists like yours truly can’t read a room, there I was, hopping from party to party last weekend at Pennsylvania Society, our Commonwealth’s annual insider soiree in New York City. That’s right; despite the message delivered by a multi-racial realignment of working class voters, there we all were, schmoozing in fancy ballrooms. In the past, I’ve expressed my unease with such hobnobbing, but that hasn’t stopped me from being a, uh, hobnobber myself.

So it was that, at one such gathering, a perturbed Teresa Lundy approached me. Teresa is a well-respected communications professional, and she wasn’t happy with my writings last week about corruption and the shame that is our sheriff — her client. We went back and forth a bit — she gets props in my book for her passion — and her message was not dissimilar from her Instagram post on our story:

Interesting the cover is a black woman elected official who hasn’t been indicted for anything but then the headline is corruption? No, the corruption is polarized media outlets like yours looking for click bait hits that likely has a struggling newsroom. Go back to real journalism for the sake of your readership.

Put aside that The Citizen has consistently been as hard on White violators of the public trust as Black; forget for a moment that, anytime a default defense of a public official is that he or she hasn’t been indicted, you’re likely on slippery turf; and wholly disregard the comedic notion that stories about municipal corruption are somehow clickbait, right up there with juicy insider accounts of Kardashian couplings.

I won’t rerun the full litany of allegations faced by Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, but let’s establish the context. There’s the slew of whistleblowers and their tales of slush fund spending and political cronyism; the missing guns under her watch; the costly lack of timely sheriff sales of tax-delinquent properties, and the glacial pace of deed consignments on those that are sold.

State Representative Jared Solomon did a good job of laying out the troubling record in his July letter to the President Judge of Common Pleas Court, in which he calls for an evidentiary hearing into the sheriff’s job performance, including her duties pertaining to providing courtroom security. After a couple of months of deafening silence, a panel of judges responded this week with a court order for Bilal to address increasingly unsafe courtroom conditions over the next three months.

What the enablers of Philly’s long-standing culture of corruption don’t comprehend or conveniently choose to ignore is that public corruption is about violating the public trust — not necessarily the law.

Given all that, Lundy’s response is telling. Notice its borrowing of Trump-like attack tactics, reminiscent of Dear Leader’s “failing New York Times” diatribes. It’s a playbook straight out of Roy Cohn — attack your critic, rather than answer the criticism. It’s a strategy Sheriff Bilal has demonstrated on her own website, scurrilously accusing Inquirer reporters of conspiring to shut down her office because she had stopped advertising sheriff sales in the pages of the newspaper. (As for her defense of the lack of courtroom security personnel, it ought to be terrifying: “The [office’s] hiring process takes 2 to 3 years to complete.”)

To be clear, I’d praised Bilal for “seeming to value problem-solving over ideology” when she was first elected, but she has been far from the breath of fresh air her office has needed. (Of Bilal’s two predecessors, it should be noted, one went on to serve jail time and the other had multiple lawsuits filed against him for sexual harassment and retaliation.) The photo Lundy references is of Bilal alongside her Undersheriff Tariq El Shabazz, who’d been fined $16,000 by the Ethics Board for — get this — moonlighting as a defense attorney. That’s right, a high-ranking law enforcement official buttresses his $200,000 salary by defending criminals. Nothing to see here, right? (“I’ve never seen anything like that in a big city,” New York Law School’s Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor, told The Inquirer.)

What the enablers of Philly’s long-standing culture of corruption don’t comprehend or conveniently choose to ignore is that public corruption is about violating the public trust — not necessarily the law. Our most troubling acts of corruption are legal, as I’ve often chronicled.

One of Bilal’s whistleblowers, Bret Mandel, went on to write a whole book about this: Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting. In it, we get this consensus around what we talk about when we talk about corruption:

• • Pithily, it’s “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain,” according to Transparency International.
  • In The Republic of Conscience, former U.S. Senator Gary Hart holds that, “From Plato to Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public … Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom … Corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all — the public interest.”
  • I particularly like the definition proffered by Zephyr Teachout, law school professor and author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United: “People are corrupt when their private interest systemically overrides public good in public roles, when they put their self-love ahead of group love. This is true if they are lobbyists or politicians, citizens or senators.”

There are no easy answers here

I’m prone to a simpler smell test: If something appears rotten, it probably is. That’s why I began last week’s piece with former Congressman Patrick Murphy’s condemnation on Fox News of President Biden’s pardoning of his own son. It was a “slap in the face to the Constitution,” Murphy said. Sad to say, it was a corrupt act because it placed family over country. And now we have not one, but two presidents telling us our justice system is rigged.

And that’s really why all this matters. Like I said, Lundy is a pro and just doing her job, working the refs, as is said in the NBA. (I’d offered to interview the sheriff, but Lundy said she’d want the questions in advance — a non-starter.) But we’re in a legitimate crisis of trust right now. Isn’t that what voters — especially non-voters — conveyed on election day last month? The challenge for all of us — citizen, pundit, communications consultant and officeholder alike — is to ask, How can we help foster belief in the idea of self-government again? After the Oklahoma bombing in the mid-90s, President Bill Clinton was widely praised for this line: “You can’t love your country and hate your government.” How many would still clap their hands upon hearing such rhetoric?

Without public trust, there is no democracy.

There are no easy answers here. But it starts with demonstrating competence and a commitment to shared values in public office, no? Put some wins on the board and maybe folks will start to believe their vote matters again. The aforementioned Solomon floated another possible fix 5 years ago, a bill that would have given Pennsylvanians the right to remove elected officials from office via recall petition, a power that some 20 states have. It never passed, not surprisingly, given its elected officials, reform thyself predicate. And when you look at California, which seems to always be in some state of recall dysfunction, I’m not sure … but it’s at least worth revisiting as a way to say to voters who are lulled into apathy by all our bad actors: You have more power than you think when it comes to clearing the stench of our politics.

Finally — and this would require a significant Charter change — maybe we need to rid ourselves of these decrepit row offices like the sheriff and register of wills and create an independent public advocate, as in New York. An elected office with subpoena power and maybe a vote on Council that is both watchdog and public-facing ombudsman. Someone you could turn to when, say, you’ve bought a property at auction and yet the Sheriff’s Office hasn’t executed your deed — even while you continue making your payments.

In New York, the public advocate’s duties are ill-defined in the city’s charter, and the position has been a stepping-stone to becoming mayor. Here, with the absence of an opposition party and not-unrelated widespread corruption, we need … a referee, accountable to the people. I’m actually just spitballing here, but I know this: If we don’t get serious about calling out elected officials who betray those who have hired them — if we don’t reform our government, in other words — incremental wins will soon no longer be enough. Without public trust, there is no democracy.

MORE FROM THE FIX, OUR SERIES ON CORRUPTION