No Arrests
Too Many Fugitives Walking Free
By Daniel Muniz

Most criminal warrants are for petty crimes like unpaid traffic tickets but an alarming number of them are also for far more serious crimes like drug dealing, armed robbery, and even murder. But to add insult to injury, most fugitives merrily go on with their lives with little to no concern of ever being arrested.

So what is going on here?

Why are there hundreds of thousands of warrants out for the arrests of criminals across the country but local law enforcement is so powerless to apprehend all of them?

In my hometown of San Antonio Texas which has a population of around 1.5 million, there are currently 28,000 outstanding warrants. The county that the city is only has 32 sheriff deputies assigned to arrest these fugitives. And that doesn’t even take into account the well over a hundred new warrants that are issued each day

So in other words, the present infrastructure makes it humanly impossible to apprehend every fugitive. Even so, suppose a gigantic task force was created and caught all of them, where would the county house them at?

The local county jail could temporarily hold a surge of a few hundred extra inmates but it couldn’t possibly handle 28,000 fugitives if they were all rounded up. But also, it definitely cannot handle the hundred or so new outstanding warrants that are issued every week. And sadly, when these people who are not found the local county judges are eventually forced to dismiss hundreds of cases at a time. So in all reality, the real number of fugitives would actually be so much higher if it were not for all of these cases that are routinely dismissed.

My local television station, KENS 5 Eyewitness News, researched a small chunk of these warrants and knocked on a few hundred doors. The results were startling. For years, one fugitive happened to be around police officers all the time since he only lived about a block away from the jail. In fact, he hadn’t bothered to move or hide from anyone yet nobody had ever knocked on this front door to inquire about the warrant.

But the rest of the country isn’t very much different than my hometown with so many fugitives freely roaming the streets. And to add insult to injury, in small towns where everybody knows where everybody lives, there are plenty of these wanted criminals who brazenly live ordinary lives without fear of arrest.

There are plenty of reasons why our justice system is so broken.

Although some municipalities don’t want to admit it, most of them don’t really want to arrest all of the fugitives because they don’t have the infrastructure to process and house them. As a result, only the high profile warrants are chased after instead of the easy ones which only require a knock at the front door.

Some jurisdictions are not structured to find fugitives. Collection agencies are experts at finding people, especially the ones who don’t want to be found or who have changed their identities. Some bill collectors, especially the junk debt buyers, spend 95 percent of their day lying on the phone tracking down debtors. Local law enforcement agencies have to be reorganized so that they have a team of researchers who spend their day accessing databases and on the phone following up leads. Afterwards, they can then dispatch uniformed officers to possible locations.

However, the bottom line is that too many local law enforcement agencies are not properly funded to track down fugitives on a large scale. They just don’t have enough personnel to do the job.

So the top priority for fixing our broken justice system is to bring this issue to the forefront of public debate. The local community is only able to accept so much crime. Unless the public is fully aware of the severity of this crisis, then local politicians won’t do much to fix a problem that doesn’t exist in their minds. The money has to come from somewhere if more funding is to be allocated for additional resources to find these criminals as well as to expand the existing jail facilities to house them once they are rounded up.

Also, technology needs to be upgraded. Some fugitives are caught by sheer luck. For example, at a stoplight a police officer can key in the license plate of the car in front of him. All of a sudden a flag pops up stating that whoever is driving that vehicle needs to be pulled over and questioned. And if that is the right person, then a quick arrest is made.

Regrettably, only a few dozen searches per hour can manually be performed at a time or a handful when someone is only casually inputting license plate numbers. But license-plate recognition software autonomously scans around 12,000 plates during a whole shift. All of a sudden, fugitives will no longer have the anonymity on our streets and highways.

Except for conspiracy theorists who believe otherwise, there is not one enormously large central database that stores everybody’s personal information. In fact, it has always been problematic to share any kind of data or at least make it more accessible. Local police computers have to be tied in to bigger national crime databases so that all this information can easily be shared by other law enforcement agencies.

One huge flaw in fighting crime is that there is not much interconnectivity with databases so it becomes too easy for a fugitive to simply move to another state or change their identity and never worry again about the problems they left behind. This has to come to an end so that wanted criminals can no longer hide as easily as they once did.

For far too long the public has been sending the wrong message to criminals. There are a lot of people who need to be behind bars. Sadly, law enforcement doesn’t have enough resources to get the job done right. And worst of all, there are too many fugitives who aren’t even hiding from the law. All it takes is just a knock on the front door for an arrest.

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