Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office seizes firearms in just 13% of domestic-abuse cases. Victims say it’s unacceptable.

After her then-husband broke her nose in 2020, Whitney Brown decided she’d had enough. She went to get a temporary protection-from-abuse order.

But once she went to court, her husband’s behavior became more erratic. And that’s when she started to worry about the gun — the one he’d always told her he had.

“He was still stalking me,” Brown said. “He was still bringing chaos.”

It would be two more years before a Philadelphia judge granted her a final protection-from-abuse order — thereby invoking a four-year-old state law designed to protect people such as Brown.

Immediately after that ruling, the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office should have served him notice and, within 24 hours, either retrieved his firearms or obtained an affidavit saying he didn’t own any.

But that never happened.

“They never went to his property,” said Brown, 38, who is no longer married to him. “They never went to take his gun.”

Nor did it happen in thousands of other cases like hers since April 2019, when the law went into effect.

Judges may request weapon relinquishment for temporary protection orders, but once a final order is granted, the law requires it. Nearly two out of three domestic violence homicide victims were killed with a gun last year in Pennsylvania, and women, in particular, are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser owns a firearm, according to domestic violence advocacy groups.

The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office received notice of 10,028 protection orders that required weapon relinquishment, such as Brown’s, between January 2020 and June 2023. But in that time, deputies had marked just 13% of those cases as completed, according to Pennsylvania State Police data. The four collar suburban counties, by comparison, had 45% to 61% compliance in that same period.

Sheriff Rochelle Bilal requested 72 hours to answer questions from The Inquirer last week, and then declined to comment.

Philadelphia’s low compliance rate persisted through a pandemic spike in shootings among partners and family members. Homicide cases in which domestic violence was the motive jumped 64%, and nonfatal gun assaults rose nearly 83% between 2019 and 2022, according to Philadelphia police data. This year is on pace to match last year’s record violence.

Bilal, who took office in 2020, has set a 70% firearm relinquishment rate as a goal and has requested millions more in funding to hire new deputies amid office-wide staffing shortages. It’s not clear whether more deputies have since been hired to the protection-from-abuse enforcement unit, though the weapon relinquishment rate in 2023 had increased slightly to 16% through June.

Advocates said successful enforcement also requires buy-in from police and courts, as well as rigorous bookkeeping in the statewide domestic violence database that tracks thousands of cases each year. In the absence of effective enforcement, however, Philadelphia’s backlog of cases has continued to grow at a far faster rate than neighboring counties.

Marcella Nyachogo, director of the bilingual domestic violence program at Lutheran Settlement House, said the dismal compliance numbers in Philadelphia sow distrust in law enforcement and put survivors at greater risk — especially as they often wait months or years for the courts to process their cases.

“When a survivor is getting a final PFA, all of those steps are making an abusive partner more and more angry and more and more dangerous,” Nyachogo said. “You can kill someone in less than 24 hours.”

Fatima Abdul Johnson, a domestic violence victim in Philadelphia who runs a nonprofit for victims called Queens United Against Domestic Violence, said women sometimes pleaded with police to take weapons out of the house after incidents of abuse.

“The weapons are used as a symbol of control,” Abdul Johnson said. “And there’s a feeling that law enforcement is not on our side because these things are often overlooked.”

Act 79 was supposed to change that in Pennsylvania.

It took years for the law to prevail in the Republican-controlled legislature, where firearm regulations have long been political nonstarters. Then-Gov. Tom Wolf hailed the passage as the “the first major gun safety bill in decades in Pennsylvania.”

Victims and advocates rejoiced. A lifeline, they thought, had finally arrived.

“A lot more victims would come forward if they knew they had the protection,” said Eunice Allen, 52, a former Philadelphia police officer and domestic violence victim. “It would deter abusers from doing the things they would do.”

Under Bilal’s predecessor, former Sheriff Jewell Williams, the first few months of Act 79′s life saw only an 11% compliance rate. Two years later, even as domestic violence-related incidents soared during the pandemic, the rate inched up to just 13%, and now up to 16%.

Months after the law went into effect, deputy sheriffs blamed sluggish compliance on flaws in the statewide database, difficulty tracking down accused abusers, and miscommunication between police officers and deputy sheriffs.

Bilal asked City Council in April for millions more to fill vacancies in the deputy ranks — despite having already sought to divert money earmarked for new recruits to give raises to herself and other executives.

The success of Act 79 also depends heavily on a statewide database called the Protection from Abuse Database, or PFAD. This is the system that tracks every step — from the initial protection-of-abuse order from a judge, to the weapon relinquishment from the sheriff, to violations of orders discovered by city police.

But data raise questions about whether that database is being used properly.

When courts file a final protection from abuse order, the database notifies the sheriff to carry out the relinquishment order. The pings continue daily until the case is marked complete — or muted.

The data show the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office disabled daily alerts for 86% of cases since the law went into effect. A state police spokesperson said sheriffs sometimes disable the daily pings if a suspect was noncompliant with the request and the relinquishment case requires further investigation. (The Sheriff’s Office declined to explain. A former deputy sheriff told The Inquirer in 2019 the alerts were automatically printed out and he disabled them to save on ink and paper costs.)

Domestic violence advocates have success getting gun relinquishment orders completed on a case-by-case basis. But the overwhelming volume of cases appear to be lost in the backlog.

“That’s not how the system should be working; it needs to be working for everyone,” said Molly Callahan, the legal center director for Women Against Abuse.

Even with protection orders in hand, victims still face violence.

In 2021, a man fatally gunned down his 52-year-old ex-wife in Fox Chase, after she had reported him numerous times to the police for violating the restraining order. (The sheriff’s office declined to confirm whether a gun relinquishment order was fulfilled in this case or in Brown’s case.)

Callahan said conversations between the courts, law enforcement agencies, and domestic violence advocacy groups remain ongoing to improve the relinquishment rate. A spokesperson for the First Judicial District said that the court’s primary role is to issue the orders for relinquishments and hear petitions from accused abusers seeking to have their guns returned, and deferred enforcement questions to the sheriff.

Nyachogo, of Lutheran Settlement House, said failure to fix the underlying partnership issues would continue to send a “dangerous” message.

“The message that it sends to survivors,” Nyachogo said, “is that even if they do everything right, even if they use all these complicated channels, the systems in place are not functioning in a way that objectively improves their safety.”

Staff writers Abraham Gutman and Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.