ST. LOUIS – St. Louis judges recently threatened to take security matters into their own hands over safety concerns and bailiff shortages.
The presiding judge of the 22nd Judicial Circuit notified the St. Louis Sheriff in December 2023 that the judges were going to hire their own bailiffs to make sure they were protected.
We caught up with Sheriff Vernon Betts on Thursday to ask him about it. responded,
“That ain’t gonna happen,” he said.
Betts said he was confident his deputies would continue securing St. Louis courtrooms, despite staffing struggles.
“That’s our big issue. That’s the elephant in the room: staffing issues,” he said.
The presiding judge raised the alarm last year about courtrooms without bailiffs. The courts have reported consequences, such as the attempted theft of a judge’s laptop behind a judge’s bench in 2022. A citizen was reportedly found with a knife near where protection orders were filed last year.
The courts want to prevent what we saw this month in a Nevada courtroom, where a defendant leaped over a bench to attack a judge.
“We shouldn’t be the courthouse that when somebody is hurt, we say, ‘Oh, we need to improve our staffing of sheriffs,’” St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason said.
The sheriff said he needs salary help. He said his deputies have a “…$34,000 starting salary. The starting salary for St. Louis police officers—the next agency closest to us—is $54,000. That’s almost a $20,000 difference. So, I’ve had that many deputies, like I said, 43 deputies leave me in 2023, going other places.”
Though Betts has replaced about half of those, he’s still short about a dozen.
“Salaries for our deputies are too darn low. That’s the bottom line. They’re low to the point of almost being insulting,” Judge Mason said.
However, the judge said it’s not an excuse to leave courtrooms uncovered.
“Building security is job one,” he said. “That’s why they’re here.”
Presiding Judge Elizabeth Hogan wrote a letter to Sheriff Betts this past December, saying the judges would be hiring their own bailiffs to make sure everyone is protected.
Sheriff Betts left our interview Thursday for a meeting about the matter and to make his case that his men and women can handle it. The sheriff seemed to convince the judges to hold off on hiring their own private security, making a promise that he would have a bailiff in any courtroom where people were present.
“I think every judge loved hearing that,” Judge Mason said. “Once that’s written down, I think that’ll be a great day and once that is written down, I sincerely believe all of my colleagues will say, ‘Well, we don’t need to worry about hiring anybody else.’ The only reason the issue came up is security.”
