‘Disaster waiting to happen’: Courthouse security incidents, trial delays have soared under Sheriff Rochelle Bilal

The video shows one man knocked out cold, lying facedown on the marble hallway floor in Philadelphia’s Family Court, reportedly with a serious head wound.

Two other men continue to brawl. A lone sheriff’s deputy, in a futile attempt to break up the fight, slaps one of them on the shoulder with a water bottle. It doesn’t work.

That fight in February, captured on video and shared online by a Fox29 reporter, is not an isolated incident.

The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office is losing control of city courthouses, according to public records and interviews with judges, attorneys, and Sheriff’s Office staff.

The problem is twofold: Assaults, threats, and other security incidents are on the rise, while criminal trials and hearings at the Criminal Justice Center are being delayed for hours or postponed because sheriff’s deputies are unavailable to transport defendants from holding cells to courtrooms.

Security-related incidents at the CJC and the city’s four other court buildings are now being reported, on average, at a rate of six per month under the leadership of Sheriff Rochelle Bilal.

Last year, the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts tracked 72 security incidents in city courts. That’s a nearly threefold increase from the 25 incidents logged in 2019, under Bilal’s predecessor and before the COVID-19 pandemic upended in-person court operations.

This year’s incidents are on pace to be even higher, with 59 reported through mid-September.

One judge last week described it as an “emergency situation.” Another called it a “disaster waiting to happen.”

In addition to the security lapses, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys say that the delays and postponements of criminal proceedings have been getting worse in recent weeks.

Benjamin Jaye, assistant chief of the Municipal Court trials department at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said some jailed defendants have waited for hours in the CJC’s basement, only to be driven back to prison because a deputy failed to transport them to the courtroom.

“It’s shocking and disappointing,” Jaye said. “The liberty of our clients is at stake and in jeopardy because there simply aren’t enough deputies.”

Meanwhile, family members of victims and defendants are left waiting together in tense courtrooms for hearings that may or may not happen.

Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott has gone so far as to explain in open court that the delays are the fault of the Sheriff’s Office, not the city courts.

“The emotional cost to victims’ and defendants’ families waiting for hours for their opportunities to give victim impact testimony or address the court is unquantifiable,” McDermott recently said in a statement to The Inquirer.

In some courtrooms, civilian court staff are left to police the room without law enforcement assistance. They have been struggling in particular to stop people from recording video with their phones.

“I don’t understand how it got this bad, where we don’t have security in our courtrooms,” said one judge, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about court operations.

Common Pleas Court Judge Nina Wright Padilla, who serves as president judge of the city’s First Judicial District, last week referred questions about security problems to Bilal’s office.

“The Sheriff makes all courtroom assignments,” court spokesperson Martin O’Rourke said in a statement. “They are solely responsible for securing all entrances to all court buildings, courtrooms and cell room areas. They are also responsible for transporting inmates to and from the prison/facilities.”

Over the last two weeks, Bilal has not responded to several requests for comment.

One of the core functions of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office is deploying deputies to secure 136 courtrooms in five buildings — the CJC, Traffic Court, Family Court, the Widener Building, and City Hall — and to transport in-custody defendants to court.

Bilal was elected in 2019 as a reformer who promised to clean up the scandal-plagued office. She took office in January 2020.

» READ MORE: With each new sheriff, same old problems: The history of Philly’s scandal-plagued elected office.

The COVID pandemic struck two months later. Security incidents remained low as in-person court business was severely restricted, according to state records. Then, in 2023, the incidents soared. The types of security incidents reported to the state can include violent acts, vandalism, threats, menacing behavior, suspicious packages, and anything that requires a police response.

“The fact that there has been this uptick is really alarming,” Eleni Belisonzi, chief of the Municipal Court unit in the District Attorney’s Office, said last week.

The lack of deputies is a topic of open discussion in CJC courtrooms, where judges and lawyers are routinely forced to wait for hearings — or hurry to conduct them — based on when a sheriff can get to the room. In one courtroom recently, a defense attorney told a client’s relative not to stray too far while waiting for a hearing to begin.

Over the summer, Belisonzi said, she noticed a “huge” increase in delayed cases. Everyone in the courtroom can be ready to go, but the defendant is missing. Some cases then end up getting postponed and can weaken over time.

“My ADAs are coming back and saying all these cases got rolled because we can’t get a sheriff,” Belisonzi said.

Judges are having to run their courtrooms without a deputy sheriff. That goes against the guidance of the National Center for State Courts. In its courtroom safety tip sheet for judges and staff, updated in October 2023, the first bullet point is: “Do not conduct court sessions or hearings in the absence of a court security officer.”

“Generally, if it’s a criminal proceeding, or one where the public is present, it’s absolutely best practice to have a court security officer, for the protection of the judge as well as the public,” said Shay Cleary, the center’s managing director of court services.

The two Philadelphia judges who spoke to The Inquirer on the condition of anonymity said, before Bilal took over as sheriff, it was rare for a criminal courtroom to be in session without a sheriff’s deputy.

“Now, it’s the norm,” one judge said.

The problem is so severe that judges working without the protection of a sheriff’s deputy are having to delay announcing sentencing decisions out of concern that it could trigger an outburst from defendants or others in the courtroom who they won’t be able to control.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” the judge said. “Do you say, ‘I’m going sentence you to jail but I want you to sit there and wait until a sheriff comes to take you to jail?’ It doesn’t work that way.”

O’Rourke, the court spokesperson, said there have been “many threats” to judges over the last several years, but he was not aware of a judge being physically attacked. He noted that all courtrooms have a panic button to “immediately” summon a sheriff’s deputy.

Roosevelt Poplar, president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, the union that represents the sheriff’s deputies, said he, too, is concerned.

“Our officers are entitled to work in an environment where they feel safe and valued,” Poplar said in a statement. “The head of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Department is responsible for appropriately staffing the Criminal Justice Center to ensure that our judges, staff and families attending hearings are safe to allow the criminal justice system to work efficiently. We continue to monitor operations at the CJC and remain concerned about adequate staffing levels.”

The problem seems obvious: There are not enough deputies in the court buildings. Less clear is whether that is due to a lack of funding, poor recruiting and training, or mismanagement of the existing employees and funding allocated to the sheriff — or, perhaps, a combination of the three.

At a City Council budget hearing in April, a Sheriff’s Office official testified that the 270 deputies employed at that time were “way below” what was needed to staff the courthouses. Major buildings, like the CJC, have about half the number of deputies the office estimates it needs.

Bilal, a former police officer who was elected to a second term as sheriff last year, later claimed that budget limitations made it impossible for her to increase staffing. She requested $10.3 million more in city funding — a 30% increase — mostly to boost hiring.

“This increase is essential due to the understaffing of uniformed and non-uniformed employees,” Bilal said.

Bilal’s chief budget director, Craig Martin, blamed training requirements that made replacing deputies a lengthy process, and other costs, such as officers out on disability, for “sucking away” the money meant to hire more deputies.

“The budget lists a certain amount of people, but they don’t give us the money to hire the people,” Martin said. “We’ve never, ever, ever been able to hire, since I’ve been here, for eight years, to hire the number of people on staff that we should have.”

But at that hearing, Councilmember Rue Landau questioned why Bilal was seeking millions more in personnel funds when budget documents showed that the department had 80 uniformed positions that were funded, but still unfilled.

Last week, a spokesperson for the city said the Sheriff’s Office ended the last fiscal year with a $1 million payroll surplus due to unfilled positions. The Office of the Director of Finance has also told the Sheriff’s Office that it can hire deputy sheriffs up to its budgeted level of 307 regardless of the budget impact, the spokesperson said. As of last week, the office had 253 deputy sheriffs.

City payroll records show that the office has about 60 fewer deputies or recruits than when Bilal took office, as attrition and a national shortage of law enforcement candidates ate into recruitment. But the office employs about 30% more deputies today than it did in 2008, and the sheriff’s overall budget has nearly tripled since that year.

Last year, The Inquirer reported that the Sheriff’s Office had diverted money intended for new uniformed positions to pay raises for Bilal’s executive staff and other nonunion office workers, according to an internal memo.

Under the office’s original plan, Bilal would have seen her salary, which was $136,083 at the time, increased by 105%. That was later reduced to 5% because the City Charter caps yearly raises for elected officials. (Bilal later said a staffer had tried to double her salary without her knowledge.)

The department has lost an additional dozen deputies since last year. The office, which pays comparatively low salaries to deputies, has struggled to make new hires. It offered a $10,784 hiring bonus to recruits this year.

In June, City Council voted to allocate $35.7 million to the Sheriff’s Office for fiscal year 2025, or $1 million more than what was in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s proposed budget.

Since Bilal took office in 2020, the Sheriff’s Office has seen a breakdown of several core functions, including sheriff’s sales, which has renewed calls for reforming the office, or eliminating it as an independently elected office and transferring its responsibilities to other city departments.

In July, State Rep. Jared Solomon, in a letter to Wright Padilla, the president judge, suggested that she hold an evidentiary hearing to fully document the “current deficiencies” and issue an administrative order to “provide for the safety of court personnel, court users, and the public; the security of financial and cash operations; and the timely administration of records.”

Solomon, a Democrat like Bilal, cited problems that have been reported by the news media and the city controller, including the questionable raises, misappropriation of revenue generated by service fees, lengthy delays in recording deeds, a three-year backlog of property auctions, allegations of missing guns, and mishandled domestic-abuse cases.

Wright Padilla has not publicly responded to the request.

Solomon said he was disturbed to learn about the sharp increase in court security incidents and the delays in proceedings due to problems at the Sheriff’s Office. He said he could speak from his own experience going to court as a child during his parents’ contentious divorce. To force people to wait together in courtrooms, sometimes for hours, under adversarial circumstances is “really disrespectful to people who are in a very vulnerable state,” he said.

“The very least we can do is provide for a functioning and effective judicial system,” Solomon said.

Andrew McGinley, vice president of external affairs at the Committee of Seventy good-government group, said it’s little surprise that the Sheriff’s Office is falling short with court security, given its history. He said the city needs to take action.

“This puts people at risk,” McGinley said. “Justice being delayed in the courthouse has real human costs. It’s eroding public trust and wasting money and starting to harm people directly.”

Jennifer Coatsworth, chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, said the security issues are particularly troubling. Threats targeting federal judges have more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service testified earlier this year. Threats to prosecutors and other court staff have also increased.

“There is a lack of respect for the judiciary and the roles our courts play in upholding the rule of law,” Coatsworth said.

The Philadelphia judges interviewed by The Inquirer each praised the sheriff’s deputies for their work, but they questioned whether they are being deployed effectively.

“There are very good, quality sheriffs who do a good job,” one judge said. “But their leadership is out of whack.”

“I’m worried,” said another judge. “The worry is that something is going to happen to a judge, lawyer, or civilian. I’m just fearing how serious that something is going to be.”

Staff writers Samantha Melamed and Chris Palmer contributed to this article.