By David B. Caruso, The Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA, Penn. (AP) - For some small-time criminals, escaping justice in Philadelphia once was as simple as moving to the next town.
At any one time, there are more than 50,000 arrest warrants outstanding for suspects who have ignored summonses, failed to show up for their trials or disappeared before they could be sentenced. The majority of those cases involve minor offenses, and police say they simply don’t have the resources to chase everyone.
But evading capture became a little tougher this month when the city’s court system, for the first time, synchronized its huge arrest warrant database with a computerized system maintained by the Pennsylvania State Police.
The move means that a police officer who pulls someone over for speeding in Reading can click a few keys and know whether the driver is wanted in Philadelphia’s huge court system.
Previously, officers outside the city had no easy way of knowing whether the people they came into contact with were wanted for failing to appear in court in Philadelphia.
The data from the Philadelphia courts will now also be included in the databases that licensed firearm dealers in Pennsylvania are supposed to check every time someone tries to buy a gun.
In the past, the state’s computerized record search of the criminal history of prospective gun buyers didn’t include a check of bench warrants issued by Philadelphia judges.
“There was a possibility that you could have a warrant on you in Philadelphia, and you could still get a gun,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Charles Brennan.
The hole was one of several in the electronic net that police rely on for information about crime suspects.
The state police database that allows officers across Pennsylvania to see information about fugitives in other counties only contains as much information as is forwarded to it by local law enforcement agencies and county courts, and each has their own standards as to what type of warrants they forward to the system.
State police Capt. Michael Nagurny, who administers the database, said most serious misdemeanors and felonies make it in, but other types of cases, like domestic violence complaints, often do not.
“Certainly we would love everyone to put their warrants into the system, but there is no mandate that they do it,” he said.
Similarly, only the most serious cases make it into a federal system that allows police to see arrest warrant information from other states. Police departments and prosecutors typically only forward arrest warrant information to the federal system if they are willing to pay the expense of extraditing a fugitive from another state.
State police Lt. James Scott said some counties balk at having an out-of-state police department detain someone for a potentially lengthy period on charges that might only carry a maximum punishment of a few days in jail or a fine.
“They figure, ‘We’ll get them if they ever come back to Pennsylvania,”’ Scott said.
Law enforcement agencies have taken some steps in recent years to close gaps in fugitive tracking systems.
In late October, Allegheny County said it would implement a new computer database that would alert police when a judge issued an arrest warrant for someone who violated a restraining order in a domestic violence case.
Formerly, the victims themselves had the task of letting police know when a judge issued an arrest warrant for their attacker.
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said she would like to see an enhanced national database that would include information on every wanted person in the country, no matter how minor the offense.