Warrant focus areas

There's been a bit of a spirited discussion going on in the coments posted on the Chief's Corner this week centering around specialized Warrants Units, and the relative priority of such an operation. One thing everyone has agreed on, though, is that it seems to make sense that putting pressure on people with outstanding arrest warrants is a good thing.

Not all of these defendants are just forgetful speeders who missed a court date. Many are petty criminals who are committing misdemeanors with abandon. The 25 year old woman I discussed yesterday is a good example. Moreover, there is some overlap between the warrants we hold--Municipal Ordinance misdemeanors which tend to be fairly minor--and much more serious criminals. The burglars, drug dealers, robbers, and professional thieves are missing their court dates on dog-at-large, maintaining a disorderly house, and driving while suspended, too. They are represented in our warrant files, but they have other, more serious criminal patterns as well.

So, if we can't beat on ten or twelve thousand doors, what can we do? In late 2005, I asked our five Team captains (who command our major geographic areas) to give me a small area of their Team where the social problems and crime is most intense, and to make a special effort to assure that people with newly-issued warrants get a little police attention within those neighborhoods. They each did so, we named them warrant focus areas, and I created a threshold alert that runs on Mondays and emails its results automatically at 6:15 a.m.. It produces a map showing the last known address of everyone in that neighborhood with a fresh arrest warrant issued in the preceding seven days. Here's the map that went to Capt. Mike Woolman and Det. Sgt. Tim Kennett of the Southwest Team on Monday:



There were eleven freshly-minted arrest warrants in this area of about 3/4 of a square mile. By limiting both the area and the time, it's a workable number. Nobody's going to bust a gut knocking on a few doors a time or two during the week. The map isn't particularly important, but the .pdf report listing the details is, and the names are hyperlinks from the report into our records management system, to facilitate very quick research and a mug shot.

The addresses on warrants are notoriously outdated, which is why the report is only new warrants. Even those are usually outdated, but much more likely than the entire pool to be either good addresses or recent ones. I think that if the police come around to your former residence looking for you, talk to your ex-boyfriend, or your previous roommate, or even the neighbor you used to share a bowl with, that it gets back to the target quickly. I took a handful of warrants with me when I spent shifts with Officer Tim Abele and Officer Cass Briggs, and we knocked on a few doors. We didn't find a single one of the people we were looking for, but I have no doubt the word got back to a few of them.

If we manage to find and arrest a defendant, he or she is off the street for a few hours or maybe even a day or two during which the normal business is suspended. If we don't find the defendant, but he or she gets wind of the fact that the police are actively looking, he or she may lay low for a while. For a professional shoplifter, she might just cool it for the day. For the suspended driver, he might minimize his driving for a few days and stick to side streets. For the drunk driver, she might decide not to hit the bars this weekend, and just get plastered alone at home. Some of these defendants may actually try to take care of the warrant before the police come around again, and some of them will even remember next time.

If my theory is right, and the chronics lay low for varying periods of time, depending on their level of intellectual organization, this can't help put have a positive effect, small though it may be. If we can concentrate this effect on the areas that need it most, and if we can combine it with other activities that have positive impacts, we can help those areas avoid the tipping point. I really wish there would have been some way to build in an evaluation component to this strategy, but we had neither the money nor technical expertise to do so at the time, and you can't always wait for the results of the clinical trials before you start attacking the infection.