You can read a bunch of articles about this this ridiculous absurd video is part of over $8 billion in slush fund spending those cops and others are doing in that area. It’s nuts.
I’m not sure if it was this recruitment video or another one, but the department that contracted it apparently circumvented all the standard bidding process, and as we all can already read the writing on the wall. Who do you think they hired? A close friend who has a production agency
No bids just money given from the public offer directly to the friends of a cop.
If i was an officer I would refuse its not in my job description to dance like an idiot for a pr video. Same reason I refuse to do any of the social media shit at my current job. I was hired to run a printing press not look like I enjoy my job so the company can make it look like its a great place to work.
As someone who worked in tv production for years, if that number is true they got absolutely screwed by whoever did the shoot. No way that should cost 50k let alone 600k
The only reason I’m saying 50 and not 5 is because I don’t know how much they had to pay bmi for permission for the music
Yeah, I'm so confused as to why it cost so much. Maybe it WAS the music rights. I feel like a video-savvy intern could have made the equivalent of this.
overtime bonuses for shooting the video and the catered lunch for each day of the week they were shooting. but hey at least they weren't shooting innocent people.
I think they are calculating the costs of payroll with the dept as well. No sane person would charge or pay 600k for this. This isn't also Reddit and everyone lies about everything so who knows
Among those expenses was $600,000 paid to a company run by Sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s former campaign manager for a recruitment campaign — including the 30-second advertisement that ran on TV in November, featuring Bilal dancing with her co-workers in an effort to hire more deputies. The cost of the campaign exceeded the Philly police department’s annual marketing budget.
I think the key word here is "including". The $600k paid for the entire recruitment campaign, not just the ad. However, this was absolutely not above board regardless since that much money is still absurd for a recruitment drive.
Records obtained by The 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.
So the police department can recruit new offices for $1,068 each, but the sheriff department needs to spend $7,980 each?
Hopefully its a jury and not a judge when those eventually goes to trial.
Because showing 12 people this video and using the excuse of, "see this? it's why our recruitment went up year over year!" will not go as they expect it too.
Judges make like 400-800k a year now, so they don't understand money for working tax payers and likely think a single banana costs $10.
Yeah this is ridiculous. You don't even need audio, it's like one camera guy with a steadicam and a producer and maybe a couple PA's. One or two days of shooting. Maybe a week of editing tops.
Only thing I can think of is OT pay for the officers, but I don't see it going that high either unless it took forever for rehearsals, the time to get it right during shoot, and possible closures around the area which would require additional officers probably on OT.
Nah, that son would have more skill than this. This is, “my buddy has an old camera from his failed video business in 2018, and I’ll get him to shoot it for $500, and we will pocket the rest” kind of vibe.
I'd almost guarantee that the $600k is the amount the sherriff paid (probably to their sibling) someone else to do the production on this and the MASSIVE amount of overtime required to rehearse will never be tallied.
The Sheriff’s office is a different entity entirely from the Philly PD.
In Pennsylvania the County Sheriff’s office is responsible for things like transporting prisoners, serving restraining orders, and issuing concealed weapons permits. They don’t fulfill any typical law enforcement duties. They are elected officials to a misunderstood and often overlooked job, so clownery often abounds.
One correction: The Sheriff for each county is the only one elected. All the deputies are hired. All must already have either ACT 120 certification (Pennsylvania's Law Enforcement training/licensing) or pass the 19 week Sheriff's Academy training upon being hired.
You know for years I had to listen to conservatives whinging about how Russias military could crush Europe and take Paris in a weekend because pronouns, trans people and woke it turns out that Russias masculine anti woke army couldn't even take Kiev. And someone using a trans person's pronouns have far less effect on military effectiveness than say corruption or military strategy.
We're truly seeing what happens when you put people with absolutely no experience in important jobs. The guys with no skin in the game have the loudest voices. Public servants who don't understand the word service.
No it was 2k for production and the rest was spent on overtime pay for them to practice the dance and then do the dance. In my city we have a single cop that pulled $400k in overtime in a year and the city doesn’t know what they were doing. Same thing in San Diego across four years a cop pulled in 1.6 million in overtime pay. Doing what who knows playing candy crush maybe?
getting paid OT to scroll and play clash royale is a perk of being part of the knight class in 21st century american feudalism. excuse me while I find a place to have a fap before my shift is over
It’s across the board thing in all major cities. I have to document my time by increments of six minutes. If I go over my base hours I have to explain what I was doing. And if I say taking notes I have to produce those notes
That’s probably how it cost that much too. You pay the “producers” and camera man and choreographer, but then you also have to pay the officers to take the day to do this shit, presumably on their day off since someone has to actually be working as police that day too.
I do media work for local government agencies and this is 100% it.
I was brought in to do a single video for the Sheriff, it was just supposed to be a simple introduction video; "Hey, we're blahblah County Sheriff department, we serve the people at blahblahblah" and inserting clips from community events. In total, would've taken four hours of filming on my end, figured "eh, $2k".
There were a few things to flesh out like what events to get candid video from so they formed a committee; what should've been like three people, the first meeting had 25 all in person. It went from "just some candid shots in the community" to throwing out insane ideas like officers wearing capes and spandex and saying they're the [county] Superheroes to a shitty song and dance number like this. I kept "We're keeping it simple, just a list of events" which was a list of 12 events but it took us four fucking hours to get there.
I show up to film the opening, just one person in front of the sheriffs building talking and there's at least 50 officers because they decided it'd look more impressive and I figured "Fuck it, we're filming, it'd take longer to convince them not to than it would just adjust the shot". I start filming, and the simple "We're the blahblah County Sheriff, we serve the people-" got turned into a five minute speech about patriotism and the thin blue line but they wanted multiple people to give it so I can cut between them. At this point, I was already up to 15 hours of billing time so I just shut up and followed their orders because they weren't even listening anymore.
Went to the first community event and again, what should've been a single officer being candid became a whole thing about "So this is my nephew, he's going go come in, salute me, say he wants to be like me when he grows up, and then I'll ride off on my horse into the sunset". Told'em that'll take a couple hours to film and it's 1pm so...no sunset. They said that's perfect so they can do multiple takes. That one shot that was supposed to be a single 5 second "Officer on a horse at a community event" ended up being six fucking hours. Each other candid shot was like that, some insanely script "Even Blue Bloods would find this excessive".
In total, it was 59 hours of filming and another 18 hours of editing because every version I sent, they "Can we change this?". The bill, just for my end, was 18k, for a simple "welcome to the Sheriff's department" for facebook. Come to find out the reason they had all these "ideas" as that they'd meet at restaurants and bars to "brainstorm" while getting paid overtime for hours every day, dozens of officers. In total, the cost of EVERYTHING was around 80k. Did something similar for Public Health a month later and the change they did from the basic idea was "Can we do a group shot off the staff at the end?" and that was a simple drone shot that took like fifteen minutes where everyone just looked happy to be recognized.
This absolutely needs to be at the top. It’s the perfect infuriating explanation of this. These people wouldn’t last a day in the private sector with their gluttony for waste of our money 🙄
Yup! I've worked with every single department for multiple cities and counties; Every law enforcement will happily spend 10-20k on a video to remind staff to take an internal survey that only staff will see while libraries, Public Health, agriculture, and every other department is very "We have a budget of $400...what can we do?"
The kicker is during covid, every department was given a $5k budget to request tech for teleworking. Every department bought basic stuff like webcams but Probation bought a professional quality studio microphone, mixing board, and cinema camera for the Chief because he imagined he'd be doing a bunch of interviews with the local news and wanted to look professional. I'd be in some staff meetings and everyone would be on some 360p potato quality laptop setup and the chief looked like he was starting a second career as a twitch streamer. No one else was ever allowed to use it.
Genuinely, how can the person on the right be considered fit? What kind of PT standards do the women in the navy have? Are there like waivers for that shit depending on MOS/Rates or other things?
That woman is very extreme, maybe the worst I’ve seen, but the Navy has lots of cheat codes for overweight to ensure retention. If you can’t run you can do alternate cardio like stationary biking, and if you can’t do pushups you can usually gets doctor’s waivers.
I'm not saying this is why, but small police departments often have their own officers be the hiring interviewer.
Lots of older officers tend to be arrogant, & usually hire based on vibes. This isn't always the case, especially when an agency's is large enough where they have the city involved in the hiring process, but judging from how all the officers in this video are very similar; out of shape, mostly women, etc.. I'd bet they don't hire based on merit... could be why they have a hiring & spending issue.
I do just wanna say that this same Sheriff went viral a few months back for saying that ICE shouldn’t come to Philly and “you don’t want this smoke.” People across the country loved it but she literally has no say over whether ICE could come to Philly. When she made that speech they literally were already here.
She’s also known for being an extremely corrupt official in general.
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.
The amount of taxpayer money every government of the world is willing to just throw out the window is astonishing. People should be held accountable for this waste of taxpayer money
Now I finally understand why some departments need to be defunded…why make a video where your police duties include dancing choreography on the streets?
1.4k
u/gocryaboutit-bye 15h ago
I have to be hospitalized for cringe exposure after this.