At the 2012 National Sheriffs Association Winter Conference in Washington DC this past January, the United Stated Marshals Service (USMS) shared a video vignette of Project 365 “Version 2” at a seminar entitled: Breaking the Stovepipe: The Critical Need to Share Threatening Communications Regarding your Public Officials. Project 365’s purpose is to make judges and their families more aware of their personal security. This is a critical and innovative training tool that engages judges with current security issues that are relevant to them.

January is typically the time we turn out thoughts to setting resolutions and goals for the New Year. As such I want to offer a goal for court security practitioners, a goal for enhanced court security training. In times of budget woes, we often restrict our execution of training because we believe the costs are too prohibitive. I argue that the costs of not training are even more prohibitive and not just in monetary terms.

Arkansas Flag

The Crawford County Prosecutors’ Office in Arkansas released a report this past week stating that the responding officers involved in the fatal courthouse shooting of James Ray Palmer were justified. The Crawford County courthouse shooting on September 13th offers an opportunity for courthouse security practitioners to critically view, in a constructive format, four specific elements within a court security-training framework. Those training elements are: security screening stations, targeted violence, active shooter response and courthouse employee emergency training.

Two articles published this past summer in Behavioral Sciences & the Law by J. Reid Meloy, etal, entitled The Concept of Leakage in Threat Assessment and The Role of Warning Behaviors in Threat Assessment: An Exploration and Suggested Typology, put forward premises that demand attention from those of us in the field of court security and in particular judicial protective investigations, threat assessment and threat management.

Director Pete Hollingsworth

I had the pleasure to meet and chat with Director Hollingsworth of the Court Security & Emergency Preparedness for the Arkansas Judiciary over the past few years about court / judicial security. I recently asked him to participate in a Q&A session for the readers of my blog and he graciously agreed.

Hooded men on motorbikes killed a mother of three on Thursday, August 11th in Brazil. The mother, Patricia Lourival Acioli, was a tough-minded no-nonsense judge. The masked men shot into her 21 times as she waited for her garage door to open. She was killed instantly.

Image by Tungphoto

Security screening stations are fundamentally the most important area in courthouse security, as the first and often the best line of defense against threats.. Within this area, a high quality x-ray machine with a well-trained staff extremely aware of their machine’s capabilities is essential to any courthouse security screening entrance. , As such, I attempt to keep up with developments in the x-ray machine equipment industry.

England for the first time in its history (which is a really long time) sentenced a juror to eight months in jail for contempt of court because she communicated to an involved party through Facebook. The juror, JoAnne Frail, contacted a defendant who had been acquitted and revealed some jury deliberations. The inappropriate communication caused the second part of the trial against more defendants in the case to collapse, leaving England with a 6 million pound bill (that’s a lot of money) for the expense of the trial that had already occurred.

Naval PostGraduate School

I recently came across a stunningly well-written thesis entitled Justice Secured: Implementing a Risk-Based Approach to Court Security authored by Sara K. Fisher and published by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. The author, wrote the thesis in March of 2008 as part of her course work for a Masters while she was working in the California Administrative Office of the Courts, specifically as the Emergency Response and Security Manager. Her thesis focuses on the need to develop a robust risk-based approach to court security and then develop a risk assessment tool to objectively evaluate relative risk across a spectrum of judicial facilities.