Norfolk VA June 5 2020

Capt. Stuart Terry was fed up. With guards sleeping on duty. With one watching porn on courthouse computers. With valuables disappearing — including a judge’s computer from his chambers.

For years, Terry watched deputies working under him protect judges, lawyers and the public in Norfolk’s eight-story, $123 million courthouse. But every night, Terry and other sworn law enforcement officers from the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office hand over the job of watching the building to relatively inexperienced and underpaid private security guards contracted by the city.

And for years, the problems with the private company — Norfolk-based Top Guard Inc. — piled up: guards sleeping on duty, failing to patrol the courthouse, napping and watching TV in judges’ chambers. At one point, the circuit court’s chief judge banned Top Guard employees from the top floor of the courthouse, where judges’ private offices are.

Top Guard’s vice president, Chris Stuart, repeatedly declined to sit down for an interview with The Pilot in mid-March, saying he and his wife, company president Nicole Stuart, were too busy reacting to the coronavirus pandemic. Two-and-a-half-months later, Chris Stuart through a spokeswoman said he could only do an interview after the article was scheduled to run.

Then, the last straw: In November, a Top Guard employee was busted for looking at porn in the law library when he was supposed to be patrolling the courthouse.

Terry fired off an email to Ray “Butch” Inman, the city official responsible for making sure Top Guard is earning the $2.5 million the city was paying every year to protect the courthouse and roughly 36 other city properties around Norfolk, including City Hall, Scope, Nauticus, the USS Wisconsin, Community Services Board offices and library branches.

Terry made sure to copy judges and court clerks on the email “in order for them to safeguard their computers and equipment.”

He didn’t stop there.

Terry said the big question still remained: Why are Norfolk sheriff’s deputies having to protect the courthouse from the Top Guard employees also “entrusted to protect it.”

Terry wasn’t the only person frustrated with Top Guard, and the courthouse wasn’t the only place where the company was failing to do its job. City officials keep their own running list of problems in a spreadsheet titled “Top Guard Security Issues.” They recorded nearly 100 incidents between 2015 and January when The Virginian-Pilot made a public records request for the document.

The 97 issues documented with the private guards included at least 22 cases of not showing up for duty, 18 of not doing their job, nine of suspected theft, nine of being on their phone instead of working, and five of sleeping on duty.

What Terry didn’t know, or at least didn’t mention in his email, is that something much closer to a 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.

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,” read Top Guard’s successful 2014 bid for the city of Norfolk contract.

In that bid, Top Guard president 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 five-year 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 five-year contract.

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 May 11, 2015: A report from the Circuit Court Clerk’s Office 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 executive 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 cell phone 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.

Amidst 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. The company’s director of operations, Theresa 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.

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.

Two days later, there was no guard at the Little Creek library branch — a fifth no-show.

In just a few years, Top Guard has grown into the largest private security company in Hampton Roads.

The company started in 1996 with 130 guards, according to documents company executives have submitted to win contracts. It grew steadily for years, then more rapidly in recent times. Since it won a third five-year contract from Norfolk in 2014, Top Guard has expanded by 65%, from roughly 625 to more than 1,000 guards.

Those guards, including more than 275 who are armed, protect hundreds of sites for 130 clients — cities, other public agencies, utility companies, colleges and universities, as well as the federal government.

Top Guard’s current and former clients include Tidewater Community College, Norfolk State University, Hampton Roads Transit, the city of Newport News, Dominion Energy, Newport News Shipbuilding and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Jefferson Lab. (The Pilot contracted with Top Guard from December 2018 to April 24 to protect its then-headquarters on West Brambleton Avenue in Norfolk, and still pays the company for guards to watch over the printing plant on Greenwich Road in Virginia Beach two nights a week.)

As Top Guard was expanding, the chief operating officer told Norfolk city officials in February 2018 that the company, like other security firms in the region, was struggling to hire armed guards because the economy had started improving. The COO, Bob Giordano, was explaining one of the reasons some Top Guard employees had been doing a bad job, leading to the “subpar performance” letter from the city.

Top Guard, which claims to receive more than 4,000 job applications a year, is currently trying to hire more armed and unarmed security guards on various online job sites. Based on the 32 salaries submitted by users, the website Glassdoor estimates the firm’s guards make between $10 and $12 an hour.

Top Guard agreed to charge the city $14.55 an hour for unarmed security guards in the first half of 2020, and $16.22 for armed guards. Typically, such figures in contracts are higher than the amount paid to the employee, to account for the company’s expenses and profit margin.

As they’ve wooed potential clients, Top Guard executives have pitched themselves as a local company that’s chosen “organic growth” over expanding recklessly in order to “offer unmatched responsiveness and attention to service quality.”

“Top Guard attracts and retains the finest,” according to the company’s successful 2018 bid to continue services with TCC.

Norfolk Sheriff Joe Baron, who’s responsible for guarding the courthouse during the day, said in a February interview that he’d heard about the company’s guards sleeping on duty and looking at porn on courthouse computers. But he didn’t know if those were isolated incidents, or how the city and Top Guard have handled disciplining those involved, so he said he didn’t have enough information to say whether the company should lose its contract with the city.

But, the sheriff added, a deputy sleeping on duty is something he would take seriously because it “creates a dangerous situation where somebody could get hurt.” He called such a lapse “unacceptable” and said it might lead him to fire the guilty party.

Baron said his deputies have had to make adjustments because they share the duty of securing the courthouse. For example, to avoid something like the gun incident at City Hall, deputies do a sweep of the courthouse every morning when they take over from Top Guard, including courtrooms. Baron said they haven’t found a weapon, but have to act as if they might.

“We’re going through that building as if we just walked into a brand new building, and we’re going to do that every single day,” Baron said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we were working hand in hand and there was this trust between the two? Yeah, but we’re not going to create a level of trust with them.”

Baron said having one agency doing security around the clock would be better than two constantly handing off the baton. “It certainly complicates operations,” he said.

The sheriff said he’s happy to take over night and weekend security at the courthouse. But he would need funding to hire more deputies because the ones he has are busy with their other state-mandated duties: guarding the jail, serving civil processes like a protective order or a subpoena, and protecting the courthouse during the workday.

When asked if Top Guard was doing a good enough job protecting the courthouse, the sheriff didn’t give a yes-or-no answer.

“That’s certainly a question for the city,” he said.

Riddick said yes to both the courthouse and city properties as a whole.

But that doesn’t mean the city isn’t looking at other options. In early 2019, city officials asked the sheriff’s office to estimate how much it would charge for overnight security. Baron’s second-in-command, Col. Mike O’Toole, did the estimate: The cost of the two Top Guard employees watching the courthouse runs about $200,000 a year, while having two deputies would run about $406,000.

In a March 6, 2019 email, he told Sandy Claxton, the judges’ secretary, that city officials had told him that switching from Top Guard to sheriff’s deputies was “too expensive.” The extra cost, $206,000, is a bit over one-hundredth of 1% of the city’s annual operating budget.

In her interview with the Pilot, Riddick said the sheriff’s office had presented the city a much higher figure because it assumed all deputies protecting the courthouse overnight would be on overtime.

In any case, Riddick said money was not the driving factor in the city’s decision to keep using private security and that there were “a number of reasons.” Asked to name any that were not financial, she did not.

Baron acknowledged using sheriff’s deputies would cost more, but said they’re better trained and more accountable than Top Guard employees. Deputies go through 14 to 16 weeks of training that the Department of Criminal Justice Services requires to become a sworn law enforcement officer. Before and after that training, aspiring officers apprentice with sheriff’s office deputies, which gives them a chance to correct trainees’ mistakes and root out people who don’t have what it takes, the sheriff said.

“There doesn’t seem to be any accountability right now,” he added.

Baron said he sympathizes with city officials. They only have so much money and want to use it to pay for great roads, schools, police officers, protection for the courthouse — everything taxpayers need, want and expect. The sheriff said he knows the struggle of weighing priorities and balancing budgets, which is why he hasn’t clamored to take over for Top Guard.

But, Baron added, if there’s a problem, they should address it.

“I don’t think that, because you can’t afford it, that you just ignore it,” he said. “That’s a conversation the city’s got to have with itself.”

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