New Bucks County Sheriff Talks About How He Is Refocusing The Office

On a recent morning, Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler was out with deputies from the Warrant Unit as they tracked down people who are wanted.

As residents in Bristol Township left for work, deputies went from location to location looking for the people on their warrant list. Deputies and Ceisler knocked on doors, searched garages, trekked through poison ivy in the woods, and checked a local gas station for those being sought.

One wanted man was arrested when a reporter was there. Deputies had leads on others and two more were nabbed later, including a fugitive with a gun.

The sunrise start for Ceisler isn’t new, but it has been a learning experience for the lawyer and U.S. Army reserve officer who previously never served in an armed civilian law enforcement role.

The sheriff said he is settling into the role and enjoying doing the job. Although, he said, much of his work isn’t on the street but behind a desk managing the office and its more than 70 deputies and additional civilian staff.

Although just months into his first term as sheriff, the Bristol Borough resident and Democrat has already made changes to how the office operates — from doubling the size of its domestic violence unit to overhauling its hiring and promotion processes.

Ceisler, who took office in January, spoke about his priorities, the results so far, and his vision for the office going forward.

The sheriff’s office is one of Pennsylvania’s oldest county row offices. Its responsibilities that include serving warrants, making arrests, transporting prisoners to and from the Court of Common Pleas, handling civil matters, and overseeing sheriff’s sales. The office is different from a police department, but the two have overlapping duties at times.

Ceisler explained that among his two biggest priorities coming in were domestic violence and bench warrants.

“Things that we thought were going to take a year, we’ve managed to get done much quicker than that,” he said.

On the domestic violence front, Ceisler has doubled the size of the office’s Protection From Abuse Unit and authorized overtime so that emergency evictions where a judge orders an abusive partner to leave the home can be carried out the same day, even late into the evening.

“Speed is everything when it comes to these situations,” he said. “Some of these victims can’t wait two or three days for that eviction to take place.”

In March, the office served 123 PFAs with a 93.5 percent clearance rate, which Ceisler describes as a record for the office. The unit also confiscates firearms from individuals subject to PFA orders.

On the criminal warrant side, the office recorded a 20.6 percent improvement in arrests in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the fourth quarter of 2025.

On the persistent criminal warrant backlog, Ceisler put the ongoing challenge in perspective.

“Right now, there are thousands of outstanding bench warrants signed by the judges,” he said. “And because of the nature of it, that number will not go down. In Bucks County, there are too many bench warrants signed daily and too many cases. A priority of mine has been to keep the warrant teams out there. What really matters is the rate that we are making the arrests and chipping away at the number.”

Domestic warrants, which include cases involving unpaid child support and alimony, dropped 41%, from 122 to 72 earlier this year.

Ceisler said the gains are not from adding staff to the payroll, but due to redeploying existing deputies.

Previously, warrant and PFA teams were being pulled into the courthouse to fill staffing gaps, leaving fewer deputies on the street.

By reassigning other deputies to courthouse duties, the specialized teams can now operate in the field full time.

“I’m no strategic genius,” Ceisler said. “We’ve just been putting them in a better position to succeed, and they have been succeeding.”

The sheriff added that there are big cases and very busy days still at the Justice Center in Doylestown Borough that require additional staffing.

Ceisler credited the rank and file with the progress.

“We have been able to achieve these tremendous results in such a short period of time because of the deputies and because of the leadership from our corporals and our sergeants and the dedication of the rank and file,” he said.

The office has also strengthened partnerships with federal agencies after pulling out of former Sheriff Fred Harran’s controversial inclusion into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 287(g) program that would give some deputies federal immigration enforcement authority.

Since pulling out of the ICE program, the office has added resources to the U.S. Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force and has worked on a partnership with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations to fight human trafficking and child exploitation.

“We evaluate every partnership on two things: whether it’s going to make the community safer and whether it makes sense for this agency to be partnering with them,” he said.

Ceisler said pulling out of the ICE program and returning the sheriff’s office to its mandated duties has helped build trust with the immigrant community, which was concerned deputies would be focused only on immigration enforcement.

“We need to be trusted in the community, with victims, with people who can give us information,” he said.

The sheriff’s office, according to Ceisler, is working with several law enforcement agencies to carry out Megan’s Law compliance checks.

Ceisler said the transition into office was smooth, citing the work of the nonpartisan deputies and his advisors. He added that he commended outgoing Sheriff Harran, a Republican, for giving him advice and information as the office changed hands.

The new sheriff has worked to manage overtime costs and staffing in the office with countywide duties.

Ceisler has pulled deputies from programs that were no longer needed or not key to the office’s core functions to add manpower to its mandated duties.

“I’ve rededicated those resources from programs that I felt were not as essential for public safety,” he said.

The sheriff said one change has been not having deputies work overtime to issue gun permits at for-profit gun stores on the county taxpayers’ dime.

“The gun stores were selling a lot of guns and it was a benefit to them,” Ceisler said. “They can still have deputies visit and do gun permits, but they can pay for the cost of the deputies now.”

Ceisler said the office continues to issue permits online and via locations in lower, central, and upper Bucks County.

Despite the changes, the office issued more licenses to carry firearms in the first quarter of 2026 than in the same period of 2025.

In addition, Ceisler has restructured the chain of command, creating four new corporal positions and a new sergeant position to bring supervisor-to-deputy ratios in line with law enforcement best practices. He has also introduced a hiring process that includes a fitness test and replacing what he describes as an “informal system.”

“It’s no longer based on who you know,” he said. “There’s no handshake hiring.”

One criticism Ceisler faced as he came to the role was that he had no uniformed law enforcement background.

Ceisler pushed back on that framing and said that a sheriff’s office is a paramilitary organization and that his military leadership experience translates directly.

“I never ran saying I was a law enforcement expert,” he said. “I ran saying I’m someone who knows how to lead a team to execute a mission, and that has held completely true.”

It’s not uncommon that an elected sheriff doesn’t have a completed sheriff deputy certification when taking office. Sheriffs who previously served as municipal or state police officers still are required to obtain Act 2 certification — the training standard for Pennsylvania sheriffs — by the end of their first term.

Ceisler recently completed Act 2 and now has the training required for deputies. He was able to waive some curriculum based on his military, legal, and EMT training.

At 34, some have said Ceisler may be using the office as a stepping stone. Ceisler does not rule out future ambitions, but he stated his focus is on the sheriff’s office.

“If I ever want to seek another office in public service, I’ll need to earn it, and I need to show that I can be an effective government leader,” he said. “My singular focus right now is doing a fantastic job.”

The office has faced internal hurdles in recent weeks, but Ceisler said he has moved forward. A top lieutenant recently left the sheriff’s office due to an after-hours incident, and a deputy was charged for sharing inappropriate photos of people being detained.

Looking ahead, Ceisler says his two biggest goals are protecting survivors of domestic violence and developing his deputies into strong leaders who can sustain the office’s changes long after his time in the leading the agency ends.

“I want my deputies to take ownership of this office in the long term,” he said. “Ensuring that this is an effective organization well beyond my tenure — that is my primary focus.”