It was in March of 2023 that a hue-and-cry was raised among the left in the City of Brotherly Love when a deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman when she was resisting a court-ordered eviction.

Landlord-tenant officer shoots woman in head during eviction, police say

Landlord-tenant officers are not sworn law enforcement personnel.

by Jesse Bunch, Max Marin, and Ryan W. Briggs | Wednesday, March 29, 2023 | 5:23 PM EST

A Philadelphia deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman in the head while trying to enforce an eviction Wednesday morning, drawing a rebuke from housing advocates and raising alarm over the court system’s use of a deputized security force to eject renters.

The incident took place inside the Girard Court Apartments in Sharswood shortly after 9 a.m. Lt. Jason Hendershot, of the Police Department’s officer-involved-shooting unit, said the woman was at home with her husband in their first-floor apartment when the landlord-tenant deputy arrived in plain clothes to serve a court-ordered eviction.

A struggle ensued in the hallway, allegedly involving a knife, he said. The deputy discharged a weapon and struck the 35-year-old woman, who was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in critical condition. It was not immediately clear if the woman, whose name has not been released by authorities, was holding the knife.

Hendershot said the deputy appeared to have a head injury, though it was unclear if he required medical treatment.

Court records show the landlord alleged more than $8,000 in unpaid rent, but ultimately reached an agreement with the tenants last May that no money was owed, the tenants would move out by January, and the landlord would make necessary repairs. The tenants sought to postpone their eviction in October, alleging the landlord had failed to fix the property as promised. A judge denied their petition last month.

Officials have not released the name of the deputy landlord-tenant officer and details on the timeline leading up to the shooting remained hazy.

Unlike other jurisdictions, Philadelphia courts rely on a private attorney, appointed by Municipal Court’s president judge and known as a landlord-tenant officer, to execute evictions. This attorney deputizes private security contractors to perform on-site lockouts in exchange for the right to collect millions in related eviction fees.

It didn’t take long for Helen Gym Flaherty, who was then running for the Democratic mayoral nomination — which, thankfully, she lost — to jump into the fray. She said she had “raised alarm bells for years about our city’s terrible eviction practices and worked to reform them.”

So, what would Mrs Flaherty have done, had she been elected Mayor? We don’t know, but I speculated, “It’s a good thing that Philadelphia evictions are privately handled! If Mrs Flaherty was elected Mayor, she would be pressing Sheriff Rochelle Bilal — who is independently elected — to refuse to evict anyone.”

And so we come to this:

Philly’s sheriff hasn’t held a tax sale in years. The city says it’s costing them millions.

The city’s failure to hold the auctions is a lose-lose: The taxes are not collected, and nuisance properties and vacant lots sit undeveloped for years.

by William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs | Christmas Eve, December 24, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The abandoned building at the corner of 36th and Race Streets is in such high demand that would-be buyers are writing their contact information on a demolition notice that city inspectors taped to the front door.

201 North 36th Street, photo via Google Maps, July 2019.

“Love this building. Interested in buying,” one person wrote next to their email address. A local pharmacist left her phone number below that message: “Also interested in buying!!”Built in 1876 as the original home of Simpson’s Apothecary, the three-story Italianate-style building near Drexel University still features the original pressed-metal facade advertising “Drugs” and “Chemicals.”

“It’s a beautiful, interesting building. I’ve always admired it,” said Robert Howell, another potential buyer of the now-vacant building, in the city’s Powelton section.

As you can see from the reproduced blurb, this article is available only to paid subscribers, so unless you are paying the Inky money, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I have copied and pasted the article accurately.

Reporters William Bender and Ryan Briggs continued to tell us that part of a wall is now collapsed, and the back yard is filled with trash and debris. More, there’s an unpaid property tax bill of over $50,000 as well as a trash collection bill over $4,000. Shockingly enough, the owner of this historic but nevertheless abandoned building seems to have simply walked away.

In April, city lawyers secured a court order to auction the building at a tax sale. The proceeds from such auctions — a key function of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office — are used to settle old tax bills. Ideally, the new owners rehab the building and get it back on the tax rolls. . . .

But the 36th Street property never made it to auction. Nor have hundreds of others across the city that courts have marked for sale. That’s because the sheriff’s office hasn’t held a tax sale for the last 2½ years.

Sheriff Rochelle Bilal and her staff won’t say why.

Messrs Bender and Briggs did their research, and continued to tell us that there are over a thousand properties already under court order to be sold for tax delinquencies, but the Sheriff just isn’t doing her job. The city is owed about $170 million in back taxes, but, without the threat of actually losing their properties — not that the owner of 201 North 36^th Street seems to care about that — there’s not a lot of incentive for people to pay their back taxes.

There are, I am certain, those people delinquent in their taxes, who do care, probably many of them living in their homes but who simply don’t have the money to pay, or even just start paying on, their back taxes. Perhaps Sheriff Bilal is thinking of those poor, poor people, or perhaps she’s just bone lazy.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this article: if the Sheriff will not hold property auctions on abandoned buildings which are under existing court ordered sales orders, buildings like 201 North 36^th Street in which nobody lives — squatters excepted, of course — how could she ever be trusted to carry out court-ordered evictions, which would mostly be of people who simply couldn’t pay their rent? Had she been elected Mayor, Mrs Flaherty might well have tried to turn evictions into non-evictions, by turning them over to the Sheriff!

The truth is that, among the left, there’s little respect for other people’s property. Oh, they’ll fiercely protect their own property, because that’s different, but Other People’s? Nope, sorry, no way.

That might seem to be a strange conclusion, given that the Sheriff has, in effect, protected the private property of the owners whose property she is under court orders to sell, but it isn’t. Rather, her inactions have damaged the properties of the neighbors of the delinquent properties, as those properties decay in their neighborhoods, sometimes become rat-infested trash heaps, possibly filled with squatters, driving down the peace and quiet of decent neighbors, and lowering their property values.