OFF THEIR GUARD Private guards who protect Norfolk’s courthouse accused of stealing, sleeping on duty and, in one case, watching porn
nightmare scenario had already happened, about a month before the porn incident and a few hundred feet away: in City Hall.
Between 1 and 2 p.m. on Oct. 2, a city worker went into a third floor restroom, opened a stall door and found a loaded gun lying on the ground next to the toilet, according to a statement she wrote at the time. She had someone call security. A Top Guard employee came into the restroom, got the gun and unloaded it, before saying they believed it belonged to a fellow Top Guard employee.
The next morning, Top Guard’s senior security manager, Michael McMillian, told Inman via email that the guard had been removed from the site and was no longer employed by the company.
In a March phone interview with The Pilot, the city’s director of general services, Nikki Riddick, called the incident “horrible” and “totally unacceptable,” but her criticism was limited to the individual who left the gun behind. In fact, she praised Top Guard’s “swift action” in replacing and firing the guard.
Riddick said the company has done a good job overall and fixed problems quickly when they’ve cropped up.
The city has until the end of the month to decide whether Top Guard gets another contract to protect public buildings.
Replacing Top Guard employees with sworn sheriff’s deputies at the courthouse would cost more — how much depends on who you ask. The city has resisted changing, but says money isn’t the main reason.
Big money
Norfolk taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to Top Guard since the city started contracting with the company in 2004. For the money, more than 100 guards watch over some three dozen properties owned or leased by the city every day. Top Guard executives have called it “one of the East Coast’s largest municipal contracts.”
In each five-year agreement, the city contracts with Top Guard for security services for a year at a time, agreeing to pay up to $2.5 million. City officials paid the company $12.3 million over the course of the most recent five-year contract. Top Guard and the city can choose to renew the contract for another year, and keep doing so for up to five years. If either side decides a breach has happened, it can end the contract with 30 days’ notice.
Under the contract, all Top Guard security employees working at city sites must have state Department of Criminal Justices Services certifications, undergo full background checks, have been with the company 12 months and have three years of security experience. The state requires licensed unarmed security officers to be at least 18 years old and to take an 18-hour course. For armed guards, it requires an additional eight hours of training.
In promotional materials, Top Guard claims to recruit veterans, former law enforcement and emergency services personnel, thus “producing more experienced, more mature candidates who offer … relentless attention to detail, uncompromising integrity, a team player mentality and composure under pressure.”
“[F]or our officers this is not just a job,” reads Top Guard’s successful 2014 bid for the city of Norfolk contract.
In that bid, Top Guard’s Nicole Stuart bragged about having “zero formal complaints or sanctions” in the firm’s 10-year history of providing security for Norfolk.
The bid also quoted Inman, the Norfolk city official who would later scold Top Guard for failing to do an adequate job: “The security officers provided have been of good quality and have provided excellent service. We have found that Top Guard Security has always worked with us and has been responsive to the city’s needs,” Inman said.
The city’s third and latest fiveyear contract with Top Guard ended in December. City officials extended until July 1 so they could formally ask other security firms to bid on a new contract, evaluate those proposals, and decide which one to go with.
The city put out a request for those proposals on March 11. They were due April 9 and, as of Wednesday, city officials hadn’t decided who won the new fiveyear contract.
Problems and promises
Top Guard employees started watching over the courthouse after hours when it opened in 2015. Before then, sheriff ’s deputies locked the old, now-demolished general district courthouse outside of business hours and no security was required. But the new courthouse is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even on holidays, to a limited group of people, like judges, high-level clerk’s office employees and cleaning crews.
After the new courthouse opened, the problems quickly started, and seem to have been the catalyst for the “Top Guard Security Issues” spreadsheet. The first entry is dated May11, 2015: A report from the Circuit Court clerk’s office stating that some old Blackberry phones had disappeared and a Top Guard employee was suspected of stealing them. But officials from the clerk’s office, the city and Top Guard determined many people were in and out of the building when the phones went missing and couldn’t home in on a suspect.
After that, problems seemed to subside. city officials noted two more issues in 2015, 11 in 2016 and four in 2017.
Then things picked up. In February 2018, Inman, a contract administrator for the city, sent a letter to Top Guard’s chief operating officer about the “subpar performance from all guards” at city facilities, and demanding that their work “improve to a satisfactory level.”
In her interview, Riddick said the letter resulted from several problems that had happened in the previous month: A guard had not shown up for work at the Park Place community center, another locked the doors five minutes early at the Mary Pretlow library branch in Ocean View and a third wasn’t tall enough to lock the doors at downtown’s Selden Arcade.
Riddick downplayed those incidents and focused on the last one. She said city officials like herself couldn’t rightfully blame Top Guard about a guard who couldn’t reach the door locks at Selden Arcade until they notified company higher-ups that it was an issue.
Three days after Inman sent the letter, Top Guard’s chief operating officer, Bob Giordano, sent an email back to Inman explaining how company executives planned to make things better. Planned actions included: reviewing guards’ performance and, if needed, disciplining them; more customer service training for certain guards; and retraining supervisors doing site checks.
But over the two years since, the problems haven’t stopped. In fact, they’ve been more serious and frequent than those leading up to Inman’s letter.
City officials documented 78 issues in just under two years following the letter (compared to the 18 over the preceding 2½ years), 16 related to the courthouse. Of the citywide problems with guards in the past two years, at least 22 were for not showing up for duty, 12 for not doing their jobs, eight for suspected theft, eight for being on their phone and five for sleeping on duty.
In September 2018, Inman emailed Top Guard’s director of operations, Theresa Morris. He’d analyzed the company’s electronic reports, which showed “big gaps” in guards’ patrols of the courthouse. He also said he was concerned about “the lack of supervision” of courthouse guards, and informed Morris that several of the agencies in the courthouse wanted to pull Top Guard because of ongoing problems.
Inman also seemed annoyed he was the one investigating the guards’ performance, instead of their supervisors.
“I am struck by the fact that I am reviewing Top Guard reports to bring this matter to your attention,” he wrote Morris, seemingly irritated that he was doing something he thought was the company’s job.
Within an hour, Morris replied, promising to pull the reports and look for improvements. She also said a supervisor would review how to do patrols with the courthouse guards, and possibly replace some of the guards.
But over the next two months, problems intensified. A MiFi device disappeared from an unlocked cabinet in General District Court. A cellphone was stolen. Water and sodas started vanishing from the staff refrigerator. At one point, city and sheriff ’s office officials hatched a plot with General District Court Clerk Tom Baldwin to install a spy camera in Baldwin’s office, to catch whoever had been stealing sodas from his private fridge.
Amid the thefts, a Top Guard employee working the courthouse was replaced.
Then, on Nov. 27, 2018, the then-chief judge of Norfolk Circuit Court, Jerrauld Jones, met with city officials and Top Guard executives. After the meeting, Top Guard agreed to clean house — replace all guards assigned to the courthouse, and overhaul the procedures for protecting it.
On Dec. 13, Inman pressed Top Guard for an update. Morris, told him she’d found a new supervisor to get the courthouse security operation back on track. She was also going to replace two of the courthouse guards with new hires, something she suspected would “make a large impact on improved services.”
But then, just days later, a judge’s laptop worth nearly $1,900 disappeared. Again, Jones demanded to meet with Top Guard execs and city officials. He also banned all Top Guard employees from the eighth floor, where the judges’ chambers are located.
Around the same time, three Microsoft Surface Pro tablets worth more than $1,000 apiece went missing in the Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk’s office, on the seventh floor. Clerk George Schaefer III instructed his employees to secure all documents and equipment before they left for the day.
Repeated no-shows
Riddick said many of the issues were isolated. Top Guard was quick to replace the problem guards and ban them from working at a city property, she said. Documents obtained by The Pilot, through public records laws, back up Riddick. Many of the infractions include information about actions Top Guard took to fix problems.
“Top Guard has been responsive to any concerns the city has raised,” she said.
And the number of problems has to be compared with the more than 100 guards who work at some three dozen sites across the city, every day of the year, logging roughly 180,000 hours.
But city records also reveal systemic problems with Top Guard’s supervision, not just bad behavior by individuals.
In June 2018, Top Guard promised to install — at Community Services Board offices — an electronic system that would track guards protecting the agency, which serves people dealing with mental health issues, drug addiction and intellectual disabilities. This was the same system that allowed Inman to discover “big gaps” in guard patrols at the courthouse.
Seven months later, the system hadn’t been installed. City spokeswoman Lori Crouch said the system has since been installed at several CSB offices, but didn’t answer when it had been installed.
Absenteeism has also plagued Top Guard.
On Jan. 8, 2019, after guards failed to report for duty on several occasions, Inman emailed Top Guard’s Morris, asking her why and to explain the company’s safeguards for ensuring guards show up.
Later that day, no guard came to the Little Creek library branch — for the fourth time in two weeks at that location. Inman emailed Morris again and “requested feedback ASAP.” Morris told him she had talked with her staff to make sure guards reported to their posts.