When emergencies arise that threaten the safety of courthouse users, court employees must be knowledgeable about and prepared for correct responses. Their actions and decisions will have consequences for their safety, the safety of others, and the integrity of court records. This measure uses interviews to determine the extent to which court employees are familiar with emergency procedures.

Planning/Preparation. The first step in applying the measure is to compile a list of employees. From this list, a sample of employees will be drawn to serve as interviewees. At least 15 supervisors or managers and 15 employees should be randomly selected.¹³

Form 1.2.4, Interview Protocol on Emergency Procedures, should be reviewed and modified (e.g., change terminology, add specific questions, or modify particular questions) as necessary to better address local jurisdictional settings. For instance, questions referring to weather emergencies (see questions 3 and 14) could be specified to include those weather situations likely to occur in the locale (e.g., a flood or a blizzard). In addition, more questions may be added regarding power outages if they are a particular problem in the jurisdiction. Power outages may occur more often than some of the other emergency situations and may be particularly problematic given the widespread use of technology in both facility operations and court communications. Thus, it may be particularly important for employees to be aware of how to respond to them.

Next, court procedures for responding to each emergency situation should be reviewed. If a court does not have written procedures regarding a particular emergency, questions about that emergency should be eliminated from the protocol.

Before the interviews are conducted, each interviewer should be given an orientation to the court’s security procedures. The data collection phase will be shorter if several individuals are available to conduct the interviews. However, care should be taken to ensure that interview responses are scored consistently across interviewers. One method for doing this is to have each interviewer complete an interview protocol for two or three "practice" interviews and then to compare the interviewers’ protocols. If discrepancies exist, the instructions for the interview protocol should be modified to increase consistency among the raters.

Data Collection. The interviews should be conducted in person with approximately 15 minutes allocated for each interview. The date and time of each interview should be recorded as part of the data for the measure. (Results of earlier interviews can be compared with results of later interviews. If employees interviewed at a later date have a higher level of familiarity with security measures than employees interviewed earlier, it is likely that the measurement process has prompted employees to become more informed.)

Data Analysis and Report Preparation. If the court discovers during the planning/preparation stage that no written procedures exist regarding a certain type of emergency situation, the identified area requires immediate attention. For emergency situations that have written procedures, data analysis proceeds with an examination of the interview information.