SAFE
A bailiff's day is physical courtroom presence: screening entrants, escorting in-custody defendants, restraining outbursts, guarding juries, and serving papers — none of which a language model can do. The automatable slice is thin and administrative: logging case activity, preparing docket paperwork, drafting incident reports, and scheduling. Sworn peace-officer status and statutory arrest/custody authority mean a human must physically be the one holding the courtroom.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $47,830 → $56,600 -5.3% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-2.2% 19,000 → 18,600 on the projections basis
Hard to automate, but shrinking anyway
The work resists current AI, yet the BLS projects -2.2% by 2034. Whatever is shrinking this occupation, the evidence does not point to automation — demand, demographics, offshoring and industry decline all shrink jobs that no machine could do.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
BailiffCity BailiffCourt DeputyArmed BailiffCourt BailiffCourt OfficerBailiff DeputyCounty BailiffDeputy BailiffCourt ConstableCourtroom DeputyJudicial MarshalSecurity OfficerSergeant at ArmsCourt Security OfficerDistrict Court BailiffGrand Jury Deputy SheriffDeputy Court Services Sheriff
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Moving a shackled defendant from holding to the well, clearing a gallery when a family member starts shouting, and physically sequestering a jury during deliberations are irreducibly manual; only the docket logs, incident write-ups, and calendar coordination compress, which is why this sits at 16 rather than 19 — a real slice of the shift is paperwork.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The work happens in an unpredictable public room — hostile litigants, contraband at the magnetometer, prisoner transport hallways, and process service at private residences where the bailiff does not control who opens the door — leaving essentially no portion of the job performable from a screen.
Licensed human required and personally liable Most bailiffs are sworn deputies or court officers with POST/state peace-officer certification and statutory arrest authority, so use-of-force decisions attach to them personally under §1983, but the sheriff or presiding judge holds the ultimate command responsibility for courtroom security, which caps this below the 16+ range of independently licensed practitioners.
Meaningful discretion Deciding when a raised voice becomes contempt-worthy, when to interpose between parties, and how much force a fleeing defendant justifies are split-second calls the bailiff owns, though standing orders, court security manuals, and the judge's direct instruction from the bench structure most of the day.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (16/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (12/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (10/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (11/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 33 of this occupation's 67 points (49%).
Embodiment (18/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 77/100, still SAFE.
Task-mix shift: if e-filing, automated docket logging, and AI-drafted incident reports remove the administrative tier, the residual role is almost entirely unscripted physical judgment — restraint decisions, de-escalation of family-court outbursts, prisoner-defendant separation — which raises the share of the day that is non-automatable
State POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) certification being made a hard statutory prerequisite for anyone performing in-custody transport or courtroom custody — several states (e.g. California's Trial Court Security Act allocations, Texas Occupations Code Ch.1701) already tie court security funding to sworn, certified deputies; extending that to bar contract/unsworn security from custody duties, with personal liability under Section 1983 for custody decisions, would deepen the shield
Written court-security standards (NCSC/state judicial council rules) that assign a named bailiff personal responsibility for threat-assessment calls on courtroom entrants and for jury sequestration integrity — post-incident reviews after courthouse attacks have pushed some judicial councils toward naming an accountable officer per courtroom rather than a shift roster
Expansion of duty scope into hybrid/remote-hearing escort and off-site custody transport as courts decentralize, plus service of process on evasive respondents, adds more unpredictable-environment work per FTE
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyer is a county government purchasing statutory coverage at a set wage, not a client choosing a human. The real risk to this occupation is headcount consolidation — courtroom-consolidation, remote arraignment, and centralized camera-based screening reduce the number of posts needed — not task automation. Score stability does not imply job-count stability.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 2,730 | $83,360 +47% |
| San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR | 800 | $37,770 -33% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 550 | $79,570 +41% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 500 | $50,660 -10% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 460 | $47,600 -16% |
| Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN | 390 | $59,450 +5% |
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 360 | $55,750 -2% |
| Cleveland, OH | 350 | $53,540 -5% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 220 | $164,040 +190% |
| Warner Robins, GA | 40 | $164,040 +190% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 110 | $100,570 +78% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 67. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.