Pennsylvania constables are locally elected law enforcement officers who serve their communities directly — carrying out court orders, maintaining public order, and protecting the ballot box. They are self-funded, voter-accountable, and historically foundational to how Pennsylvania organizes law enforcement.
Constables are trained through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) — the same agency that trains sheriffs and deputy sheriffs. Under Act 49, no constable may perform judicial duties without completing mandatory training:
The curriculum covers criminal and civil law and procedure, the unified court system, court security, prisoner transport, mechanics of arrest, crisis intervention, management of aggressive behavior, use of force, defensive tactics, chemical aerosol, professional ethics, and firearms qualification. The PCCD firearms qualification requires 60 rounds at 75% accuracy — comparable to the municipal police standard.
Beyond the state mandate, most constables invest substantially in additional private training throughout the year — Taser certification, emergency vehicle operations, patrol rifle, Rescue Task Force, active shooter response, CPR and bleeding control, tactical emergency casualty care, search and rescue, community policing, domestic violence response, FEMA emergency management, and more. Every hour of that training and every dollar it costs comes out of the constable's own pocket.
There is no municipal budget allocation for constable equipment. Every piece of gear a constable carries — badge, duty belt, body armor, firearm and ammunition, radio, and transport vehicle — is purchased and maintained at the constable's own expense.
The transport vehicle is not optional. AOPC standards require constable vehicles used for prisoner transport to meet visual and functional equivalency standards comparable to police and sheriff vehicles, including a prisoner cage. A vehicle meeting those standards, combined with the rest of the duty kit, routinely costs more than $10,000 out of pocket before a constable performs a single service.
This is a recurring cost, not a one-time investment. Equipment wears out. Vehicles need maintenance. Training standards require current gear. Constables absorb all of it — while being paid a per-service fee that the legislature has not updated to keep pace with inflation.
Constables are not salaried employees of any government body. The statutory fee schedule (44 Pa.C.S. § 7161) governs only constables' judicial duties — warrant service, civil process, prisoner transport for the courts, and similar court-directed work. It does not cover, constrain, or reimburse constable activity outside that judicial scope (training, public safety response, election duty, locally contracted services). Even within the judicial scope, the schedule has not kept pace with inflation, and it never included benefits: no health insurance, no pension, no sick leave, no workers' compensation.
At the same time, constables bear all the costs of running the office themselves — training, equipment, vehicles, insurance, and the professional liability insurance that Pennsylvania law requires them to carry (44 Pa.C.S. § 7142). The IRS classifies constable fee income as self-employment income, adding a 15.3% self-employment tax burden on top of ordinary income taxes.
The picture that emerges is straightforward: the Commonwealth relies on constables to perform essential court, public-order, and election functions, while offloading the full cost of performing those functions onto the constables personally. Pennsylvania gets professional law enforcement services; constables get a judicial fee schedule written a generation ago that does not even cover the full scope of what the office actually does.
Now that you know what constables do — learn what they're facing.