Before you train the people, look at the building.

What it covers

Every place a courthouse is exposed, and the gaps between them.

• Screening at the public entrance, and every other way in
• Circulation: where the public, the judge and the prisoner cross paths, and where they should not
• Chambers, the bench and the routes between them
• Holding and prisoner movement
• Parking, arrival and the perimeter
• Duress, camera and access systems, and whether anyone is watching them
• Post orders, staffing and the response when something happens

Most of what goes wrong in a courthouse goes wrong in the gaps: the side door propped open for the clerk, the hallway the family shares with the defendant, the alarm nobody has tested. The assessment is built to find those.

For the committee

Written for the judge who chairs the committee, and for the committee.

SB 42 put a court security committee in every Texas county, with the local administrative judge at its head and the sheriff and the commissioners court at the table. The committee owns the policy and recommends what gets funded. The report is written for that room: each finding rated, each fix in order, in language a committee can vote on and a commissioners court can budget for.

What you receive

A report you can hand to the committee.

A walkthrough of the building with the people who run it, on a working day, so the assessment sees the courthouse as it is used rather than as it was drawn.

A written report, with each finding rated by how serious it is and a prioritized list of what to fix first, what to fix next, and what can wait for the budget cycle.

A briefing to the court security committee, the sheriff and the commissioners court, in language that supports a funding request.

Findings are measured against the U.S. Marshals Service judicial security standards, the National Center for State Courts guidance on court building security, and the Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State Court Administrators Court Security Handbook. Those are the standards a county will be measured against after an incident, so they are the standards the assessment uses before one.

The pairing

The assessment tells you what to fix. The class tells your people what to do.

Most counties pair the assessment with training, because a report on its own changes a building and a class on its own changes a detail, and a courthouse needs both. The findings from your building become the scenarios your officers rehearse.