Warrant backlog puts MCSO on hot seat

Tens of thousands of fugitives have remained on the lam for years across Arizona. A year ago, law enforcement launched an array of operations to investigate and serve thousands of additional warrants.

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However, the extra manpower and money has done little to shrink the backlog, particularly in Maricopa County, where an outsized share of the problem resides.

Maricopa County is home to 3.9 million people and about 39,000 active felony warrants, according to data from the state Department of Public Safety.

By comparison, Pima County, the state’s second largest county, has more than a million residents but just 2,800 known fugitives.

Like many U.S. metropolitan areas, Pima County has long had a team of sheriff’s deputies, city police and federal agents that works full time to serve felony warrants.

Valley police agencies only began collaborating in this manner last summer.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office does not have a single detective assigned to serve felony warrants, Deputy Chief Paul Chagolla said last week during a state Senate judiciary committee hearing on the issue.

Deputies do serve more than 10,000 warrants each year in the course of their regular duties, Chagolla said. And MCSO is responsible for maintaining the database of outstanding felony warrants, like all Arizona county sheriffs.

“NO WARRANTS CRISIS”

MCSO disputes the notion that a problem even exists.

“There is no warrants crisis,” Chagolla said during the hearing.

Sen. Jonathan Paton, R-Tucson, disagrees.

Paton, the judiciary committee chairman, said he is scheduling additional hearings about warrants with the hope of passing legislation to make specific police agencies accountable for catching criminal suspects.

Every police officer in Arizona is responsible for serving felony warrants.

State law, however, does not require any law enforcement agency to make sure those fugitives are apprehended. County sheriff’s offices must only enter warrants into state and national databases.

The state laws regarding felony warrants are outdated, Paton said, and sheriff’s offices are best suited for tracking down fugitives.

“In our state, we haven’t really figured out what it is the sheriff should do as the population changes over time,” he said.

Paton said he intends to focus future hearings on how other Arizona counties, as well as other parts of the nation, address outstanding felony warrants.

Clint Bolick, an attorney and analyst at the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix think tank, argues that Maricopa County’s fugitive backlog should be MCSO’s responsibility.

“Certainly, this could be a place to start,” said Bolick, who last year criticized the law enforcement operations of the sheriff’s office in a widely disseminated institute report.

Chagolla, MCSO’s records division chief, told lawmakers the sheriff’s office would be willing to accept responsibility for the backlog if it received additional money to do so.

NUMBERS DISPUTED

Further, he said Maricopa County’s fugitive count is typical. Chagolla provided figures for other metropolitan areas, including San Diego County, Calif., which the deputy chief said has more than 18,000 outstanding felony warrants.

Not so, according to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

Susan Plese, a department spokeswoman, said the county has 3,151 such warrants.

The sheriffs for both San Diego and Pima counties assign detectives to partner with U.S. Marshals and other law enforcement to apprehend fugitives.

The San Diego Fugitive Task Force includes 60 detectives from several federal and local agencies, said Deputy U.S. Marshal Omar Castillo. “We chase the guys down wherever they’re at.”

State law does not mandate that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department try to serve all felony warrants in its jurisdiction.

Regardless, the county sheriff has nine detectives working on nothing but warrant cases, said Lt. Michael O’Connor, head of the Pima sheriff’s violent crimes division. Tucson Police Department detectives and U.S. Marshals also staff a task force to arrest fugitives.

“Even if the task force were to go away, we would still have a contingency of detectives that their sole assignment at the sheriff’s office is to hunt fugitives,” O’Connor said.

The U.S. Marshals Service in Phoenix last summer altered its drug trafficking task force to do the same, serving felony warrants for violent offenses, particularly sex crimes, said Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Hershey. Detectives from the Mesa and Chandler police departments work directly for the task force.

MCSO recently joined the U.S. Marshal’s specialized fugitive team to provide intelligence and support, though no manpower.

“We don’t have, like, deputies on the streets with us,” Hershey said of MCSO.

Maricopa County’s backlog, nearly 42,000 in April 2008, has about 3,000 fewer felony warrants now, according to figures from the MCSO.

But that progress came as state and local police warrant workload lightened: The overall number of warrants issued by the courts last year dropped by more than 4,000.

Chagolla argued at the hearing that counties should remove from the backlog warrants issued 10 or more years ago.

Such a move would reduce the fugitive count by 4,200, MCSO data shows. More than 28,000 of the remaining 39,000 warrants are from the past five years.

CHANGE IN LAW URGED

Lawmakers on the Senate judiciary committee said they largely agree that state law regarding felony warrants needs to change.

But debate raged among the senators over whether Maricopa County’s sheriff office must change its operations. The committee argued over local immigration enforcement and Chagolla’s contention that felony warrants don’t pose a problem.

“You said we don’t have a crisis,” Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-Phoenix, said, addressing the MCSO deputy chief, “but in the same breath you said we had 39,000 warrants.”

Asked how the sheriff’s office collaborates with other agencies on fugitives, Chagolla cited MCSO’s Web site. The site features a public database of outstanding warrants.

“We do more than our part to do this,” Chagolla told the lawmakers.