Wanted: A better system for bringing in bad guys

If last week’s four-part Dispatch national investigation into the stubborn quagmire of unserved arrest warrants didn’t give you the creeps, you probably didn’t read it.

Often even the best journalistic exposés are limited in whom they affect, but the decades-old problem our reporters uncovered — arrest warrants being ignored — has the potential to affect any one of us in the worst way imaginable.

A mentally unstable man with a known penchant for knives and who has eluded authorities in another state could erupt in random violence at a shopping mall or other public place that you or a loved one has the unfortunate luck to be in at the same time.

A wanted felon with ready access to guns could be lucky enough to be among millions of Americans free on open warrants, and you or a loved one could be unlucky enough to be in range when he goes on a shooting spree.

Or a driver whose license has been suspended and who shouldn’t ever be behind the wheel could be impaired again and headed straight for your car, driving the wrong way and coming too fast to avoid a crash.

Granted, these are hypothetical worst-case scenarios, but no less plausible than the real examples Dispatch reporters Mike Wagner, Doug Caruso, John Futty and Gatehouse Media Reporter Daphne Chen uncovered in the four-day series, Wanted.

At the other end of a chaotic mess, the series revealed instances of mostly lawabiding citizens who thought they had dealt with their legal obligations but end up in jail when a new traffic stop unearths a forgotten infraction with a warrant attached for failure to appear in court. They spend hours or days behind bars even though they could not have faced jail time for the original violation.

The series shatters our collective sense of comfort in a system that is supposed

to appropriately dispense justice to those who are duly charged with the full gamut of crimes and traffic offenses, from aggravated murder down to driving with a broken headlight.

Now we know the scary truth: Too many bad actors roam free while minor offenders consume precious law-enforcement and judicial resources that should be diverted to more serious cases.

These are some of the findings that now shake our sense of security:

• More than 5.7 million cases in 27 states have open arrest warrants; the number could easily be double if the other 23 states had usable data.

• In Ohio’s six largest counties, about 92,000 warrants have remained unserved more than a decade, and more than 23,600 outstanding warrants in those counties involve violence, weapons or sexual crimes.

• In Franklin County alone, more than 1,000 new arrest warrants may be filed weekly from a combination of new crimes and missed court appearances, with no realistic hope that a majority of them can be served.

• Making a failing system worse, many warrants are never entered into Ohio’s Law Enforcement Automated Data System or the FBI’S National Crime Information Center, reducing chances that wanted persons will be arrested in other jurisdictions and jeopardizing lawenforcement officers by failing to flag potentially violent offenders in simple traffic stops.

It is beyond disturbing that in today’s data-rich environment, this lifeand-death data gets buried under its own weight while groceries, banks and credit-card services can and do track our every move — online and in person.

The Dispatch reporters searched for jurisdictions that had solved the deadly dilemma of unserved, unprioritized warrants and found few bright spots anywhere in the country.

Michigan does a better job than Ohio of entering all warrants into its LEADS-LIKE system, but as of August, it still had more than 1 million warrants unserved.

California, New Jersey and a county north of Indianapolis are trying to reduce the glut of warrants issued for missed court appearances by front-end efforts to reform the bail bond systems and better ensure court appearances. New York City sends text messages to remind people of court dates. And Philadelphia joins NYC in prohibiting arrests for minor infractions.

In short, no one has figured out yet how to reliably resolve the problems our series uncovered.

But that can’t be the final answer.

We urge Gov.-elect Mike Dewine and Attorney Generalelect Dave Yost to follow through on their promises to make the ever-growing challenge of unserved warrants a priority when they take office in January.

Creative solutions could also come at the local level — in county common pleas and municipal court clerks’ offices, in local police and sheriffs’ departments and even from private bail bondsmen.

To fail to fix this keeps us all at risk, and that is unacceptable.