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District judge outlines drop in local crime, explains pretrial and court changes
Summary
At the Feb. 18 Lansdale Borough Council meeting, District Judge Ed Levine said pretrial services, public defenders at preliminary hearings and recent DA participation have changed local arraignments; he reported declines in criminal caseloads and crime rates while noting heavy landlord-tenant and civil dockets.
Judge Ed Levine, the district judge covering Lansdale and surrounding areas, told the Lansdale Borough Council on Feb. 18 that changes in court procedures and staffing have altered how cases move through the system and, by some measures, coincided with lower criminal case totals.
"I am judge Ed Levine. I'm the district judge here in Lansdale, Pennsylvania," Levine said as he opened a data-rich "state of the judiciary" overview. He described pretrial services, a vetting process started countywide in 2021 that the court uses to assess defendants' criminal histories and appearance risk before arraignment. Levine said pretrial personnel provide monitoring levels that range from monthly check-ins to ankle-bracelet supervision.
Levine credited the recent presence of both public defenders at every preliminary hearing (for qualifying defendants) and district-attorney representation at criminal proceedings for improving case handling and legal argumentation. "Now we have a district attorney in there," he said, calling DA involvement "a really positive thing" because it brings more nuance and better objection practice to court proceedings.
On caseload and crime-rate trends, Levine presented borough- and district-level numbers. He said Lansdale's jurisdiction has grown substantially and noted his district's population increase since 2010. At the same time, he said, total criminal cases have declined; he cited a drop in criminal caseloads to about 333 cases in 2024 and described a roughly 41.5% decrease in the district's crime rate from prior years.
Levine also said civil filings remain high in his court, driven largely by small-dollar credit-card debt cases, and that landlord-tenant dockets are busier in Lansdale than in many neighboring courts because of the borough's concentration of rental units.
During a short question-and-answer period following the presentation, Levine offered to share the slides and the underlying statistics with council and residents. He noted that the county-level judicial administration publishes court-by-court statistics and said the borough may obtain more detailed breakdowns — for example, by offense type — from county records.
Levine declined to attribute causes to the trends definitively: "I don't give reasons. That's just what the numbers show here at the district court," he said. He encouraged residents to observe arraignments and other proceedings to better understand what appears in court records and how cases are handled.
The judge's presentation drew several follow-up requests from council members and residents for the underlying data; Levine agreed to provide the information used in his slides.
