Metal Detectors to Be Installed on 4th Floor of Courthouse : Violence: Oklahoma bombing, shootings in Seattle spur decision to add devices near the rooms where family-law cases are heard.

Trying to head off courthouse violence in Ventura County, local judges announced Monday that the courthouse will install metal detectors near the courtrooms that handle the county’s most emotionally explosive cases.

It is not the criminal courtrooms but the family courts on the fourth floor that hold the most potential for violence, judges and sheriff’s deputies agree.

“There is a saying that in the criminal law department you see the worst people on their best behavior, but in family law department you see good people on their worst,” said Robert C. Bradley, the assistant presiding judge of the Ventura County Superior Court.

To no avail, court and sheriff’s officials have been trying to find funds for years to limit the county Hall of Justice to two entrances guarded by deputies and equipped with metal detectors.

But in the wake of the massive bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City last week and the shooting of three women during divorce proceedings in a Seattle courthouse last month, local officials have decided not to wait any longer--at least on part of their plan.

Starting May 1, people will still be able to enter and wander through the courthouse without being subjected automatically to weapons searches. But they will not have access to the building’s fourth floor without going through the weapons-detecting device.

That is the floor where domestic-violence and other heated family-law cases are heard.

“With Seattle and Oklahoma, we felt the time is here,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Merwyn Dowd, who heads the Courts Services Division. “I think that those incidents had a push on us. We needed to do this, and we needed to make this a priority.”

For the most part, the local courts have been free of violence, authorities said. But Dowd said a couple embroiled in a child-custody dispute ended up in fisticuffs during an April 3 hearing.

Recently, the families of the victim and defendant in the case of a Port Hueneme man convicted of murdering a Simi Valley fisherman and his dog nearly came to blows after the guilty verdict was announced.

In criminal courts, county officials have employed metal detectors on a temporary basis in cases involving gangs and other violent defendants, authorities said. Still, Dowd and others said that the Sheriff’s Department only has enough equipment and staff to search people for weapons on one floor of the four-story courthouse. They chose the fourth floor because of the violence that family law cases have evoked in the past.

“There was an incident in the old courthouse (in west Ventura) where somebody pulled a gun out and fired on the other party in the case,” recalled veteran prosecutor Ronald C. Janes, a chief deputy district attorney. Neither Janes nor Judge Bradley could recall if the victim was hit by the gunfire in the 1977 domestic case.

Janes said he is happy to see metal detectors being installed on the courthouse’s fourth floor. But he predicts violence in the courthouse if similar measures are not taken on other floors, because of rising gang tensions at the Hall of Justice.

“I think that’s only a minimal step and insufficient to address the real problems that exist in the courthouse,” he said of the metal detectors. “We can all see that it’s not the relatively safe courthouse that it used to be in this county.

“It’s only a matter of time until there is an incident,” he said. “It’s real clear that there’s a lot of tension and its a real problem with the number of gang members in the courthouse these days.”