Sheriff Danny Ceisler took time out of his schedule to speak with the Bucks County Beacon about his time in office so far, the transition from campaigning to actually leading, and the work he and his deputies are doing to rededicate the office’s time and resources to the duties that actually keep the community safe.
Danny, after the long and politically charged election last year, how was the transition to actually doing the job and leading the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office? For example, you’re the third sheriff in three election cycles, and all of you are very different. How does that turnover impact deputies, if at all? Has it presented challenges for you, at least early on?
Sure. So first off, actually the fourth sheriff in four cycles. Bucks County does not love to re-elect its sheriffs, at least in the last four cycles. But the thing that has made the transition pretty smooth, and I believe has made the transition smooth for past sheriffs, has been the fact that you have this really excellent core of nonpartisan, very professional deputies who carry over from administration to administration. And one of my main goals during this transition has been to not come in saying I know everything about the Sheriff’s Office, but to listen to, learn from, and rely on these experienced, talented deputies whose vision for the office aligns with my own.
How are you changing or improving the culture of the Sheriff’s Office?
So one of the things I’ve been really focusing on is getting really to the core of what our job is as a sheriff’s office. So we have some core functions. I really consider us the law enforcement arm of the courts, meaning that not only do we protect the courts and transport inmates, but we ensure that court orders — like restraining orders, which are called protection from abuse orders — or bench warrants when someone doesn’t show up to court, are properly executed and followed. I’ve been returning to focusing on those core duties. And from a culture perspective, it’s really just saying, Hey, if you guys, if you show up to work, if you take pride in your job, and you do the job you’re assigned in one of those core duties, you’re going to be taken care of. I’m gonna have your back to the end of the earth as long as you do the right thing for your community.
I think that’s gone over well with people. In my experience leading in other contexts, whether it’s soldiers, or attorneys, or government workers, as long as they know that you have their back and you have the mission of the office in mind, they’ll generally line up behind you.
One promise you made on the campaign trail, and then immediately kept when you took office, was terminating the previous sheriff’s controversial ICE 287(g) task force model agreement. On July 7 when ICE agents in Texas shot and killed Houston’s Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three and construction worker, it was, at least for me, another stark reminder of how Bucks County may have dodged a bullet both figuratively and literally with potentially heavier ICE presence. In fact, according to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights in a report they released last month, 52 people have died in ICE custody in the first 500 days of Trump’s second administration, not to mention two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, who were some would say executed.
What kind of feedback have you gotten from the local immigrant community and their advocates, knowing that your deputies would not be working with ICE on sweeps, raids and street arrests?
Frankly, it’s been very touching to hear the feedback that we’ve received from the immigrant community in Bucks County, particularly the Hispanic community, because we have a number of different immigrant ethnic groups. I’ve made as great of an effort as I can to do outreach to those communities, to meet them where they are, and really to see this entire community that exists in the shadows in our county. And to communicate with them that they are safe to call 911, that they are safe to come to the courthouse and take care of whatever business that may be, whether that is you know going to family court or getting a marriage license. There’s a whole community of people that have been afraid to come to our courthouse, even to be witnesses for crime. And to hear people say I now feel safe. That you had a community of people who were not ordinarily politically engaged, but were following a local sheriff’s race and actually were aware of the results—it’s incredibly meaningful to be able to help that community feel safer.
And frankly, getting rid of 287(g) for me was not just about protecting one vulnerable population. It was a public safety issue for the entire county. Because when you have a whole section of people who are afraid to call 911 to report crime, to come into the courthouse to testify and be witnesses, that makes everybody less safe. And when you have deputies who should be focused on those core duties and responsibilities, but instead their leadership is putting them through additional training, which takes time away from their job, and can ask them to do any number of these powers that the task force model grants, that’s not good for community safety either. So I want to make very clear my opposition to this program was not merely on moral grounds, it was on practical public safety grounds.
You’ve prioritized protecting domestic violence victims for your office. You recently noted a 41% overall reduction in outstanding domestic warrants during the first quarter of 2026. Your deputies served 123 protection from abuse orders just in March alone with a 93.5% clearance rate. And then that clearance rate climbed to 96.7% in June, compared to 78% in June of last year. More so, you created a new unit dedicated exclusively to swiftly enforcing emergency domestic violence eviction orders.
Could you talk about how you recognized this need, why this was a priority for you, as well as share what went into creating this unit and how it works?
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. The Sheriff’s Office does kind of 12 different things or so. We have all different responsibilities. But when I think about what is truly life-saving, what do we do that has an immediate impact on people’s health and wellness? That is our work in the domestic violence space.
So with domestic violence, there’s a few things that we do. We are responsible for the service of protection from abuse orders because a hearing cannot properly take place, an order cannot properly go into effect, until it is served on the alleged abuser. So doing that as quickly as possible, and as efficiently as possible, is essential for protecting the vulnerable.
And I’m very proud to say again in June we had a 96%+ clearance rate on effectively, quickly serving those orders, as opposed to 78% last year. And this eviction unit, that I’m very proud of as well. Which is, sometimes when a judge grants one of these restraining orders — protection from abuse orders, is the technical title, or PFA — when a judge grants one of these orders, they order that if the two people are living together, that the abusive partner has to leave the home immediately, that they have to be evicted from the home. And it is essential that that is carried out as quickly as possible, because the most dangerous time can be once an individual has learned that this order has been granted against them, that their partner has sought a restraining order, but before they are separated.
READ: Sheriff-Elect Danny Ceisler Will Prioritize Domestic Violence Prevention
This had actually been raised to us by two groups. First, A Woman’s Place, which is a wonderful, wonderful, effective nonprofit organization in Bucks County, which supports women who are in domestic violence situations. And then my own deputies. I met with A Woman’s Place and my deputies, and I said to both, what do you need? What resources, what manpower do you need to fill whatever gaps we have in protecting victims as quickly as possible? And the number one answer that came back was we need to be able to do these evictions faster. And the way we do them faster is twofold.
First, we have just more people dedicated to this work. And second, we extend the hours. Rather than having this unit end at 3 o’clock, which they had previously done — our protection from abuse unit went until 3 p.m. — we now have guys going till 6 p.m. in their standard hours, which matters because these orders often come in late in the afternoon. So at one point, it would be if something came in at 3 or 4 o’clock, it might not be till the next day it was acted on. Or if it came in on a Friday at 3 o’clock, it might not be until Monday.
So now not only do we have people working till the end of the day, so when one of these orders comes in, they can handle it swiftly, we have the ability and the flexibility to have them go deeper into the evening. And really any time of day that we need to act on this, even if it’s 10 p.m., 11 p.m., we can do that, because of the flexibility I’ve now built into this team.
Are there additional costs baked into the expansion of these programs?
Everything has costs and it has costs in two ways. First, manpower, because it’s manpower I can’t spend on something else, and potentially overtime hours. One of my jobs as an executive is to take a limited amount of resources, a limited amount of manpower, a limited amount of salary and overtime, and spend it in such a way that I believe it will best serve our community. So what I’ve done is I’ve pulled from other programs that my predecessor prioritized that I felt were not as essential for public safety, and frankly were relatively political in nature, and I’ve rededicated those resources to more life saving measures.
What were a couple of those programs that you thought were not kind of a good, or an effective way to spend resources and manpower on?
So my predecessor had a program called the Mobile Gun Permit Program, where every single weekend they would set up at a private gun store, and we would have two to four deputies on overtime every weekend giving out gun permits at these gun stores.
[Former Republican Bucks County Sheriff Fred Harran promoted his office’s gun permit events on Facebook in August 2024. An offensive depiction of the American flag? The post was eventually taken down after public outcry. Screenshot by Cyril Mychalejko.]
It was a really good benefit for these gun stores. They were selling a lot of guns on top of it. So, what we’ve done is say, if a gun store wants to host one of these mobile gun permits, they can pay for it. We don’t make any money off of it, they just reimburse the cost of the gun permits. Additionally, we’ve extended some hours in our actual locations, like our government locations. Also, these gun permits can be done online. They can be done 24 hours a day online, and we’re really pushing that out. So the amount of money that went into running this mobile gun permit program was extraordinary and gave us a lot of flexibility once we’ve said, Hey, if you’re a private gun store and you want to host one of these, you just have to reimburse the taxpayers.
Additionally, there were a number of people in our office who were doing jobs that frankly are probably part-time jobs, part-time duties. It’s very common in law enforcement for you to have what’s called an additional duty, an officer to have an additional duty, that’s on top of your full time job. We recognized several people who had jobs that really should be additional duties, but they had them as full time jobs. So by making them full time ordinary deputies, we freed up manpower, which we were then able to put into these domestic violence roles.
Arresting criminals with outstanding bench warrants was something that the office under the previous sheriff struggled with. Under your leadership, the Sheriff’s Office improved criminal warrant arrests by 31.25% in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of 2025. Can you explain how and why the greater success?
So just to kind of explain what this is a little bit more, the Sheriff’s Office is responsible for serving what are called bench warrants. Bench warrants are when somebody’s supposed to appear for court, a hearing, and they don’t. And at that point, they are technically a fugitive from justice, and a judge signs an order ordering the Sheriff’s Office to bring that individual in. There are thousands and thousands of outstanding bench warrants in Bucks County. That number will never go down. There are too many added each day for that number to go down. What matters is the rate at which you are making arrests and kind of putting dents and chips in that number. That’s why we’ve been very proud that in my first quarter we had a 31.25% increase in arrests relative to the first quarter of 2025.
The way we’ve been able to do that is first and foremost: your priorities are reflected by how you spend your resources. This has been a priority of mine, just like domestic violence has. And we have ensured that our warrant teams have the necessary manpower who are able to go out all the time, not miss any days — which had happened under the previous administration — go out every day and execute these warrants. Second, we’re being smarter in our tactics. Our tactics had become very stale, where, without getting into too much detail, I think criminals knew that teams pretty much went out the same days, the same times, each day. They knew if they just hid outside of those windows, that they would be safe. So we are changing our tactics there. And we’re also using intelligence better. So there are tremendous federal resources that provide intelligence assets to local law enforcement, and they’re free, and we’ve been using those, which helps us to be more accurate in our targeting. So by just changing tactics, being more accurate in our targeting with intelligence and dedicating more manpower, we’ve seen an immediate improvement in our fugitive apprehension.
You’ve mentioned A Woman’s Place. I know that you’ve also reached out to immigrant advocacy organizations to listen and and learn about their concerns and suggestions. Are there any other community partnerships that you’re engaged in or that are on the horizon that you’d like to mention?
So one initiative that we are in the process of launching, that’s gonna be very important to us, is if you live in Bucks County there’s a decent chance that you’ve gotten a scam call from someone pretending to be the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office. It is a rampant scam. I get calls every day asking, if something is legit.
It is never legit.
The Bucks County Sheriff’s Office will never call you and ask you for money. But there are these really kind of believable calls and numbers. They spoof our office number. And we’re gonna be launching an initiative getting into senior facilities — because they’re also often the targets — getting out into the community to let people know how to not get fooled by one of these scams. So that’s definitely an important community initiative that we are going to undertake.
What’s been one or two highlights of your experience leading the Sheriff’s Office in these first seven months of the year?
I would say a highlight has been the beginning of a new chapter of our office, which has taken two forms. First, we totally redid our hiring and promotion processes to make them merit-based — no handshake hirings or promotions or things along those lines. And we actually restructured the office because the office chain of command needed to be redone. We created a number of new corporal positions who are first line supervisors, and we also had a number of openings for new deputies, and we filled all of them. We now have, even relative to a month ago, some really talented, young, energetic deputies who are getting started. And awesome first line supervisors, people who have been working really hard, who deserved a promotion, but because of the old chain of command, there just weren’t opportunities. We had a ceremony honoring the new corporals, honoring and swearing in the new deputies, and it marked a transition to this next generation of leaders who really reflect my vision of servant leadership, dedication to community and dedication to the mission of the office.
I feel like I’ve kind of put my stamp on the office now with this new chain of command and with our new hires, and just seeing good people have good things happen has been a major highlight.
What’s something new that you’ve learned about the community in Bucks County since taking office?
This is going to be a not fun one, but you know, it’s the first one that comes to mind. I live in Bristol Borough and I go out with my warrant teams to go after these bench warrants and go after these fugitives. I go out with them every few weeks just to see how things are going. A lot are in Bristol Borough. You know, it’s fun seeing houses two blocks away where we have to go in in the morning. So that was probably not the uplifting answer you wanted. But it’s the first one that came to mind.
It is a massive county. Bucks County, you don’t really think about it, but it has 54 municipalities. It’s a huge geographic area, it is a diverse area. If you’re in Bensalem or Bristol, when you think of Bucks County, you may think of this blue-collar, working class, more urban area. And then if you’re in New Hope or Doylestown, you may think of Bucks County as this really affluent suburban county. And then if you’re further up in you know near Nockamixon, you may think of it as a more agricultural, rural, farmlands type of place. It’s a huge place, it’s diverse. And one of the best parts of this job and the campaign is just constantly getting to see all of it and meet as many of our 640,000 residents as we can, because it is an interesting, fun, cool, big, diverse county.
Before we go Danny, did you have any kind of message that you wanted to share with the broader community about you and the work that you and your deputies are doing?
I’d say first in terms of a message about our office and the work the deputies are doing: I think our office took a lot of heat because of the ICE partnership and what Sheriff Harran signed, but don’t think of the office that way. It is a group of, again, nonpartisan, professional, dedicated community servants who should not be held responsible for the decisions of my predecessor. And that said, for anyone else who’s listening, if you see a Bucks County Sheriff Deputy say hi, thank them for their service, because it’s often a thankless job. Most people don’t know what Sheriff’s deputies do, but they are hardworking, they are dedicated, and it really does go a long way just to say thank you, and stay safe, and we appreciate your work.
Well, Danny, thanks so much for coming on and for your time, and thanks for the work that you and your deputies have been doing this year and rededicating the purpose of the office to serving and protecting the community.
Thank you very much, Cyril. I appreciate it.
Transcript edited by Alexa Schnur.
