Fortress Courthouses: the Sad, Painful Reality That May Be Our Future

Last week’s shoot-out at the Van Nuys courthouse has brought to a very tight focus the concern of judges about public safety in the courthouses of Los Angeles County. Was what happened at Van Nuys entirely random, or was it symptomatic of a developing pattern? Probably the latter, sad to say.

We have been having lots of incidents lately. Fortunately, most of them have been close calls. For example: I was hearing a civil wrongful-death case in the downtown civil courthouse. The father of the deceased came every day to glower at the defendant. One day the door guards caught him at the main entrance with a very large loaded gun stuck in his belt. Blind luck!

Not long ago a woman got her throat cut in a restroom at the Van Nuys courthouse. Her assailant was her estranged husband. We have had a run of stairwell muggings and some gunplay at the Pasadena and Santa Monica courthouses. More close calls.

At the Compton courthouse, where we have metal-detector screening at the doorway, the monthly take averages about 160 knives and five loaded guns.

We do not regularly screen our other courthouse entrances. Money for metal-interdiction equipment and personnel has been hard to come by, and perhaps we have not been pushing hard enough on courthouse security issues. We have tried to be reasonable in our requests to the Board of Supervisors; we know that there are large and urgent needs for public money these days.

There has been a lot of discussion among the judges lately about the “fortress courthouse” concept. On the one hand, we want the people who come to our courthouses to feel comfortable and as much at ease as possible in places that are by their very nature intimidating. Most of the people who do come are always a little nervous anyway--the jurors, the witnesses, the parties to the actions. Thousands of people come to our facilities every day. Most of those who come are entirely innocent of evil purposes and violent designs. A shakedown at the front door for knives and guns and a parcel search are both intrusive and intimidating. The presence of a metal detector, that symbol of rampant terrorism, would suggest that the battle for public order is being lost at the very place where public order is supposed to be enforced.

We take away a lot from our peaceable traditions when we suggest that the palace of justice is a place where it is possible that one might experience an instance of the random violence that is so tormenting our society. It is not good to frighten gentle people.

On the other hand, there is something that we judges know well because we deal with it every day. Our lovely County of the Angels is suffering mightily from an increasingly rowdy and dangerous subpopulation. They are the vicious and reckless hoodlums and their highly organized gangs, the drug people with their low thresholds of personal control, the smoldering paranoids and the dangerously delusional. We found out how dangerous the crackpots can be at Van Nuys last week.

Courthouses are places where external reality as to culpability often collides suddenly and violently with denial mechanisms. We deal all the time with highly emotional estrangements and profound disaffections. Who can tell what action will explode out a delusional mind or one that is bent on vengeance or on escape? We do know that the Los Angeles Basin is awash with knives and guns and with people who are likely to go berserk in the context of juridical proceedings.

Everything in life is a trade-off. Are we going to preserve tradition and run our courthouses wide open, as we have always done in gentler times, or are we going to acknowledge a painful reality and circle the wagons, so to speak? The choice is obvious and urgent.

It’s now perfectly clear that we are going to have to go to full security in all of our courthouses, and that means creating checkpoints with whatever equipment and personnel may be needed to interdict the knives and the guns and the hell-bent. We are going to have to make all our facilities as fail-safe as we can, and we are going to need public support in our effort to get our court security programs funded.

It’s going to cost a lot of public money, but the cost will be no higher in human as well as economic terms than the cost of just one really bad incident. The people in the courtroom at Van Nuys last week were lucky. An alert and courageous bailiff and a tough and valiant judge held the incident down to one dead and one wounded. How much worse it could have been.