Sponsors (24)
The bill centralizes expertise, monitoring, assessments, and reporting to strengthen courthouse and judicial safety nationwide, but it raises privacy and civil‑liberties concerns, creates new costs and administrative burdens, and may exclude local actors or leave smaller jurisdictions struggling to keep up.
State and local judges, court staff, and court-operated facilities will receive proactive threat monitoring, training, and technical assistance that directly improve personal safety and preparedness.
State and local courthouses and related facilities will get professional security design input and physical security assessments that reduce vulnerabilities and improve building safety and accessibility.
Law enforcement and court administrators across jurisdictions will benefit from a standardized incident reporting system and national database plus coordinated research and best-practice development, improving information-sharing and coordinated responses to threats.
Individuals and communities face increased privacy and civil‑liberties risks because collecting, centralizing, and sharing threat reports and surveillance-related information can enable broader monitoring, mission creep, or expanded law‑enforcement powers.
Taxpayers, states, and localities will bear new costs — creating and operating state centers, a national database, paying for outside design/consulting, and producing reports — which could increase budget pressures or demand additional federal/state funding.
Local and smaller organizations may be excluded by eligibility limits that favor national nonprofits with specific expertise, reducing local input and potentially sidelining community-specific knowledge.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes SJI to fund national nonprofits to create State judicial threat and intelligence centers for training, assessments, threat monitoring, coordination, and a national threat database.
Authorizes the State Justice Institute (SJI) to fund and support qualified national nonprofits to create State judicial threat and intelligence resource centers. Those centers would train courts on officer and staff safety, do courthouse security assessments, monitor and coordinate responses to threats with law enforcement, create standardized reporting, and help build a national database tracking threats to State and local judges and court staff. The bill also requires SJI to report annually to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on threats, including counts by type and seriousness.
Introduced July 22, 2025 by Lucy Mcbath · Last progress July 22, 2025