Arrest warrant trends reflect backlog
Jails, courts still struggling with cases delayed by pandemic protocols
Over the past several months, the Times-call has reported that Longmont has seen spikes in domestic violence cases as well as auto thefts.
An analysis of police data shows that in January 2023, the number of suspects arrested on active warrants surpassed both of those types of crimes. According to Longmont Public Safety daily police reports Jan. 1-31, there were at least 56 suspects arrested who had warrants. That’s up from at least 32 suspects in December and at least 30 suspects in November.
While it might look like the number of suspects arrested with warrants increased sharply from December to January, the daily police reports don’t list every person arrested with warrants, according to Longmont Police Chief Jeff Satur. In cases in which an individual faces multiple charges for an incident, the incident is usually listed by the main criminal charge, which may not be an arrest warrant. So the actual number of people with warrants who were arrested in Longmont in recent months may have been higher than the data suggests.
Even so, because of lingering backlogs in courts and jails from the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a large number of people with outstanding arrest warrants — often, multiple warrants — who are not in custody.
“This (pattern) is extending over several years,” Satur said. “It’s not hard to find story after story after story out there about people with multiple warrants for their arrest.”
Suspects have been able to accumulate multiple arrest warrants (and often, remain free in the community) partly because of COVIDERA restrictions on who could be brought to jail for a bond appearance in the first place, Satur said.
During the beginning of the pandemic, before COVID-19 vaccines were developed, the Boulder County Jail had to limit its capacity due to social distancing and other health precautions. Prisoners could no longer be housed in crowded cells, and as the jail began to run out of space, police started to arrest suspects only for more serious crimes.
“It had to be a certain class felony,” said Satur, noting restrictions have eased somewhat recently. “For a while … there had to be clear danger to the community,
clear belief that this person was not going to stop doing what they were going to do.”
The result was that many suspects who would normally have been arrested in pre-pandemic times were not.
But those who were arrested sometimes had another pathway to be quickly released through the bond setting process.
When someone is arrested, a judge in the court with jurisdiction over the case sets the suspect’s bond. For certain types of offenses, bonds for low amounts or personal recognizance bonds — which allow the suspect to leave jail on the condition that they appear at all court dates — can be quickly authorized. But in other cases, the judge hears arguments from a prosecutor as well as a defense attorney before setting the bond.
There are laws that guide the bond setting process, according to Boulder County First Assistant District Attorney Katharina Booth. One of them says a judge must set the least restrictive bond possible that will keep the public safe and encourage the individual to appear in court. And prosecutors and defense attorneys often don’t agree on what that is.
“There is this kind of … push point a lot, where we all argue that difference, what constitutes the least restrictive measure in order to still protect community safety and assure the person’s appearance in court,”
Booth said.
Before the pandemic, PR bonds were typically reserved for suspects who are deemed a lower risk to the community, Booth said. But COVID-ERA restrictions and overcrowding in the Boulder County Jail also changed the threshold for who could receive a PR bond, and these types of bonds started being issued much more frequently.
Satur said he thinks PR bonds provide less incentive for defendants to appear in court because they don’t have to pay — and they don’t risk losing money if they don’t appear in court.
“If they don’t show up for court, now they have a warrant for their arrest,” Satur said. “But kind of the point is they still get out without any real accountability.”
That type of arrest warrant — for failure to appear in court — is common. And when suspects, particularly repeat offenders, remain in the community, they sometimes continue to commit more crimes and can accumulate more warrants that way.
But when setting a bond, Booth emphasized, the goal is often to try to manage people who’ve committed crimes in the community through supervision or other programs that don’t require them to be jailed — especially if they’re suffering from mental health or substance use disorders.
“It’s a very big issue for us to be thinking about: Is our jail … the right place to be managing those suffering from mental health?” Booth said. “How are we helping people outside of the jail?”
And as people accumulate warrants and their cases stretch out over everlonger periods of time without resolution, Booth said, it can have a “compounding effect,” further bogging down the court system and delaying defendants from getting essential help or resources.
“Now we’ve got multiple cases instead of the one — if we had been able to manage the first one, maybe we would have gotten that person the right intervention that they needed, whether it was substance abuse treatment, or mental health treatment, or both, or that supervision to kind of restabilize that person to help prevent the next crime from happening,” Booth said.
“But instead, they stayed on that warrant status, and then they ended up picking up another case.”