WHEN JUSTICE GOES UNSERVED

Thousands Wanted On Outstanding Warrants -- But Law Enforcement Largely
Ignores Them

California is swarming with fugitives, bail jumpers and scofflaws who roam
the streets without fear of arrest -- despite the warrants hanging over
their heads.

The numbers are staggering. The state has a backlog of more than 2.5
million unserved warrants for felony and misdemeanor crimes. Most are for
minor offenses, but tens of thousands of those warrants are for people
wanted for violent crimes, including more than 2,600 outstanding homicide
warrants.

And in most cases, nobody is even looking for them. Not the cops, not the
sheriffs' deputies, not the highway patrol.

"These numbers are startling and disturbing and represent a serious defect
in the criminal justice system," California Attorney General Bill Lockyer
told The Chronicle.

"It breeds disrespect for the law ... and exposes innocent people to
criminal behavior," he said.

But local, state and federal law enforcement agencies have largely
abandoned the job of serving warrants in all but the most serious cases.

"The outstanding warrant list ... has the very guys who are beating up
their wives, the very guys who are driving drunk, the very guys who are
casing your neighborhood to burglarize your homes at night," said San Diego
Judge Larry Stirling.

Experts say that failure to serve warrants -- court-ordered commands to
arrest people -- undermines the criminal justice system, threatens public
safety and costs the government hundreds of millions of dollars in
uncollected fines.

In San Francisco, David Silva had a long history of drug convictions. On
December 29, the 45-year-old homeless man failed to appear in Municipal
Court for sentencing on a new set of possession charges. Judge Wallace
Douglass issued a felony bench warrant for his arrest.

But the warrant was never served. Ten weeks later, the body of 86-year-old
Velma Studendorf was found inside her Mission Terrace home in San
Francisco. She had been raped and beaten to death.

Silva, whom Studendorf had apparently befriended, allowing him to store
belongings in her garage, immediately became the prime suspect. He was
arrested several days later and, after DNA testing was conducted, charged
with murder. Police sources now say Silva is being investigated in
connection with yet another slaying.

San Francisco police say they simply do not have the staff to serve bench
warrants

- -- and virtually every other law enforcement agency in the state finds
itself in the same position.

"Nobody has the manpower for the multitudes" of bench warrants, said San
Francisco police spokesman Sherman Ackerson.

Overwhelmed and understaffed, law enforcement agencies argue they have more
pressing priorities than serving hundreds of thousands of warrants for such
minor offenses as skipping a sentencing hearing in a drug possession case.

"This stuff isn't the priority that a string of robberies out in the Marina
District is or a serial rapist in the East Bay," said Michael Rustigan, a
criminologist from San Francisco State University.

But as the Silva case may show, and countless others have demonstrated, no
one knows when a petty criminal could turn violent.

In California, felony and misdemeanor warrants are entered into state and
regional computer-tracking systems. The hope is that during routine traffic
stops or in the course of another investigation, officers can run
background checks that will disclose any outstanding warrants. They can
then take the suspects into custody.

But critics charge this "chance encounter" approach plays fast and loose
with public safety, allowing suspects to remain free, potentially to commit
new crimes. Police, in effect, are counting on new criminal acts, if only
to be given a second chance to catch the suspects. "What we're saying to
offenders is that you can acquire a warrant for any number of reasons, and
unless you happen to get picked up on another charge, (the warrant) is
essentially meaningless," said David Kennedy, senior researcher at Harvard
University's Program on Criminal Justice and Management.

Not only do suspected criminals remain at large, but they also often can
escape justice entirely. Thousands of cases are dismissed on constitutional
grounds every year -- simply because police delayed or failed to serve the
warrants.

Meanwhile, California's failure to serve outstanding warrants -- and to
collect the fines associated with them -- is costing the government
hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Last year, California courts collected more than $1 billion in fines and
forfeitures, and experts say the state's more than 2.5 million unserved
warrants represent a potentially huge source of revenue for law enforcement.

"There is probably as much money sitting out there as is already being
collected," said Tom Hunt, three-time president of the California Criminal
Justice Warrant Services Association, a statewide body of warrant officers.

"And you and I are paying for this in our taxes."

California's criminal justice system has not always been inundated by
unserved warrants. Police, sheriffs' deputies and marshals once fanned out
across communities, serving warrants on their beats as part of their daily
routine.

"In those older days, if you didn't come in on your speeding ticket, they
went out and got you," said Judge Sam Mesnick, who served as a Bay
Municipal Court judge in Richmond from 1983 until his retirement in 1997.

But times have changed, and myriad factors have spawned a vast swamp of
warrants that now mires the criminal justice system.

Sorting out the causes is not easy, but the first one experts invariably
point to is the dramatic rise in crime that began over 30 years ago and has
only recently abated. Between 1960 and 1991, murder rates nearly doubled
across the nation, while robberies and rapes increased more than 300
percent, according to FBI statistics.

As arrests increased, jails became overcrowded. To cope, judges, instead of
locking up suspects, often released them without bail with a promise to
return for their next court date. For their part, police, rather than
arrest minor offenders, issued citations and then released the suspects
with the same expectation.

When suspects failed to appear for their court dates, judges issued bench
warrants instructing police to take the suspects into custody. But this
caused the number of warrants to balloon, and the police did not have the
time or the staff to serve them all.

"The skeleton in the closet for law enforcement agencies is the fact that
on lower-level crimes, if you're arrested and let free, you can walk off
and not go to court and nobody's going to go out and arrest you," says
Contra Costa District Attorney Gary Yancey.

Suspects soon caught on. Realizing that warrants had become virtually
meaningless as an instrument of the law, they simply ignored them.

That may have been the case with an East Bay ex-con named Todd Anthony
Williams.

Williams had served prison time for robbery and burglary, then was paroled
into Alameda County in May 1991. The following month, he skipped a meeting
with his parole officer, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

For more than seven years, Williams remained at large. The state Department
of Corrections, which runs the prisons and goes after parole violators,
said Williams was not a high priority case among the state's 20,000 parole
violators.

"We'll put our bang for the buck on the person with the most risk," said
department spokesman Steve Shroeder. "That means sex offenders, violent
felons, people who have used deadly weapons."

Then, last October, Williams and two others were accused of going on a
brutal six-week crime spree, allegedly attacking a series of women in the
Bay Area and Southern California.

One of the victims was 58-year-old Alice Tennyson, who was kidnapped on
November 17 as she stepped out of her car across the street from her office
at the U.S. Treasury Department in San Francisco.

For three days, Williams and his associates allegedly kept her bound,
gagged and blindfolded -- often in the trunk -- before finally dumping her
in Laguna Beach, bound to a park bench with duct tape.

Tennyson told a reporter she had not known that Williams, who was arrested
in Los Angeles after a high-speed car chase, had long been wanted for
parole violation -- but that the warrant for his arrest had never been served.

"You're kidding," she said.

Then, after a pause, she said: "That means if he had been in custody, this
might not have happened."

No one in California knows exactly how many unserved warrants there are. It
is an orphaned issue, with no state agency responsible for keeping an
accurate tally.

"Even within a single jurisdiction people may not have a count of their own
warrant records," said Harvard's Kennedy.

The best statewide estimate comes from the California Board of Corrections,
which each quarter polls all 58 counties to determine the number of
unserved warrants. But more than a dozen counties do not participate,
leaving the department to make an educated guess.

Those Board of Corrections estimates show that despite a sharply dropping
crime rate, the number of unserved warrants in California has remained
relatively stable, declining only about 4 percent since the beginning of
1996 to 2,595,335 at the end of last year.

The board does not break down warrants by type of crime. But the California
Department of Justice has a database of 680,000 people wanted on warrants,
and this provides a clearer picture of that population.

Most are being sought for serious misdemeanor offenses, but almost 223,000
individuals are wanted on felony warrants, including more than 74,000 for
possession or sale of dangerous drugs; 39,000 for violating probation or
parole; 6,600 for assault; and 1,400 for rape.

Other states are also inundated with unserved warrants. Texas has 132,000
outstanding felony and "serious misdemeanor" warrants, while Florida
records 323,000.

The Bay Area has about 238,000 outstanding felony and misdemeanor warrants,
according to reports from the nine counties. San Francisco County accounts
for about 28,000, roughly corresponding to its 12 percent share of the Bay
Area population.

The warrants are filed away in Room 460 at the Hall of Justice, along with
more than 50,000 unserved warrants for traffic violations.

There in the county's Central Warrant Bureau, the misdemeanor warrants are
alphabetically arranged in a bank of mammoth Rolodex trays, whereas the
felonies are housed in green file cabinets. Between 80 and 100 new warrants
come into the bureau every day.

Thumbing through one of the misdemeanor trays at random, a reporter quickly
spots packets of yellow warrant cards bound together by rubber bands,
identifying suspects wanted on multiple warrants. A casual search locates
one suspect with 28 warrants, all but three issued for failing to appear
for court dates.

Most warrants are for minor offenses, including thousands issued to the
homeless for drinking out of an open container, urinating in public,
camping in city parks and other low-level crimes.

But there are also 12,000 unserved felony warrants. In a random sample of
100 of them, The Chronicle found that most were for the sale or possession
of drugs. But the sample also included warrants for other offenses,
including burglary, assault with a deadly weapon and having sex with a minor.

Fifty-one of the warrants in the random sample were issued in 1995 or
before. More than a dozen were from the 1970s and '80s.

The ages of the warrants seem to prove what everyone is willing to admit:
In all but the most serious cases, only a handful of San Francisco's 2,100
police officers is actively serving warrants.

It is the worst-kept secret on the street.

Just a few blocks from the Hall of Justice, on Sixth Street, a bare-chested
young manwith an unsteady walk acknowledges that he had had several bench
warrants out on him in the past stemming from drug cases.

"No city cop is going to kick down the door to go looking for you unless
you raped or murdered someone," he says. "If you get picked up, it all
depends on their mood, your behavior and how full the jail is."

A few blocks into the Tenderloin, another young man leaning against the
brick facade of residential hotel readily admits to having an outstanding
felony warrant, although he declines to say what for.

"It's not a problem," he says, his smile revealing the absence of front
teeth. "It's just the environment we hang in."

He does not bother to step out of view when squad cars cruise by.

"If you have a felony murder warrant, they'll go after you," he says.
"Otherwise, they just drive by and pick you up if they want to."

"It's just the inconvenience of not knowing when."

California law requires law enforcement agencies to serve all warrants, no
matter what type of crime they are issued for. But the sheer volume of the
state's outstanding warrants makes serving all of them effectively impossible.

Police and sheriff's departments around the state have been forced to make
tough choices: Go after warrant scofflaws or assign officers to other, more
immediate priorities, such as responding to 911 calls, expanding domestic
violence units or adding to gang task forces.

The result: Staffing for warrants details has been cut back.

Six years ago, for example, eight officers were assigned to the Oakland
warrants detail. Now only four are in the unit. Twenty years ago, the San
Francisco police had a unit of 25 officers who served warrants, mostly for
parking and moving violations. That was in addition to a several-person
fugitive detail. Now, the city has only two full-time warrants officers and
another officer who tracks out-of-state fugitives.

"Police departments have gone more toward work that is tangible and
immediately productive," said Sergeant Thomas Parisi, head of San
Francisco's Fugitive Unit. "Working warrants is man-hour intensive. Say you
have a guy come back who sat for four hours on a misdemeanor warrant case,
waiting for that individual to show up at his last address. The guy's got
no productivity. It's easier to say I responded to 10 calls for service on
my shift." Budget concerns also make some police and sheriff's departments
reluctant to notify the state's Wanted Persons System when warrants are
issued for suspects wanted for low-level crimes.

That is because listing a suspect with that system obligates counties to
pay transportation costs to return the suspect for prosecution. If the
individual is caught at the other end of the state, transportation costs
can easily run into hundreds of dollars.

Most felony warrants are on the system, but in some counties warrants for
serious misdemeanors, which can include spousal abuse and drunken driving,
are never entered.

Moreover, when the court issues a warrant for a low-level crime, it is rare
that a copy, or even notice, is sent back to the station house. So cops on
the street and those on warrant details often do not get the word that a
warrant has been issued.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of warrants cannot be served -- because,
for all practical purposes, the police do not even know they exist.

The wholesale failure to serve warrants is more than a threat to public
safety. At a time when law enforcement cries out for more funding, it is a
missed financial opportunity, as well.

Experts say hundreds of millions of dollars in fines go uncollected. Nearly
80 percent of the state's unserved warrants have fines attached to them,
and judges have a tool to help them collect that money.

Since 1985, California judges have had the authority to levy $250 civil
assessments in addition to the original fines when suspects in low-level
crimes fail to appear in court.

Instead of issuing a bench warrant, a judge can impose the assessment. If
the assessment is paid, the case is closed and no court appearance is
necessary. But suspects who fail to pay the assessment and the fine are
turned over to collection agencies, rather than the police.

In 1994, San Diego became the first county to routinely invoke the law, and
the results were swift and conclusive. Four years ago, the county had a
backlog of 750,000 outstanding warrants. Now, the county has about 120,000.

Last year, the county collected more than $15.8 million under the law --
$7.5 million from fines and $8.2 million from the civil assessments.

"It's efficient. It's self-funding. It's just," says Judge Stirling. "The
real measure is that if we have a warrant, it's because we want the guy."

But the law is little used, largely because many judges have never heard of
it.

"What's the statute?" asked veteran San Francisco Superior Court Judge Lucy
McCabe when told of the law by a reporter.

After reading the statute, McCabe said she was intrigued, noting that she
thought it might work in some traffic cases. But she also said that in many
other misdemeanor cases, the offender does not have enough money to pay the
original fine, let alone the additional one.

Another local judge, who did not want his name used, said he was not aware
of the law either but still preferred a bench warrant because he wanted the
suspect back in his court rather than getting off with a fine.

The overwhelming backlog of unserved warrants, in effect, encourages
suspects and criminals to defy the courts, according to some law
enforcement experts.

"How can you argue that (the failure to serve warrants) would not embolden
a criminal to commit minor crimes?" asked Robert Kochly, the chief deputy
district attorney in Contra Costa County. "There's no respect for the system."

One of the most obvious symptoms of contempt for the criminal justice
system is the individual who carries multiple warrants -- and openly flouts
them while continuing to commit crimes.

Take the case of 26-year-old Joseph Desantiago, a reputed South Bay gang
member with a long criminal history, who goes by the nicknames "Spray" and
"Deadeye."

Earlier this year, Desantiago, who has two eyeballs tattooed on the back of
his head and "666" on his forehead, was wanted again

- -- this time on a narcotics warrant and a no-bail felony warrant for
violating his probation.

But San Jose police failed to serve the warrants, allowing Desantiago to
remain at large.

Then on January 14, Desantiago allegedly began drinking with friends while
driving around Palo Alto and Menlo Park. That evening, they headed south on
East Bayshore, next to Highway 101, weaving through traffic and allegedly
randomly spraying other motorists with gunfire.

"Anybody who would not get out of the way, they would take pot shots at,"
said Palo Alto Detective Adrian Moore, who investigated the case.

A terrified witness took down Desantiago's license number and called the
police. At that point, Palo Alto and San Jose police finally made an effort
to find Desantiago, who was well known, if only for his tattoos, in the San
Jose area.

A few weeks later, police caught up with Desantiago and arrested him after
a high-speed car chase. He is now in Santa Clara County Jail, charged with
assault with a deadly weapon.

Fortunately, no one was hurt in either incident.

A spokeswoman for the Palo Alto police explained why Desantiago had not
been sought earlier.

"It would be a beautiful world if we could serve every petty theft warrant
we get," said Detective Lori Kratzer. "But you have to establish
priorities. You've got to work your biggest cases. Anything else would be
negligent."

But to Steve Ferdin, a San Jose policeman who, in his off hours, produces a
television program about fugitives for a local cable channel, the
Desantiago case illustrates the growing disrespect for the courts -- and
the threat to public safety these unserved warrants pose.

Sure, the Desantiago case turned out all right, Ferdin said. "But the
garden-variety warrants are just not being sought. If we would just serve
the warrants we have, heaven only knows what grief we would save society."

WHY WARRANTS ARE NOT SERVED

Peace officers attempt to serve arrest warrants in high-profile crimes such
as homicide, but most felony and misdemeanor warrants go unserved. The main
reasons law enforcement agencies do not serve lower-level warrants include:

- -- Other Priorities

Law officers say 911 calls, gang task forces and community policing have
become top priorities. The time-consuming job of serving warrants has
fallen out of favor.

- --Staffing Cuts

Warrant details, fugitive task forces and marshals have been cut to the
bone in many jurisdictions.

- --Communication Breakdowns

In many cases, peace officers never receive notice that a particular
warrant has been issued.

- --Inadequate Computer Systems

Almost three-quarters of the warrants issued in California are not entered
on the statewide warrants database.

- -- Sheer Volume

The millions of unserved warrants that have accumulated over the years have
simply overwhelmed law enforcement agencies.

Steve Kearsley / The Chronicle

GLOSSARY

Warrant: A court order, signed by a judge, commanding law enforcement to
arrest an individual and bring him or her before the court.

Arrest warrant: A warrant, often requested by a peace officer or district
attorney, for the arrest of an individual wanted in connection with a crime.

Bench warrant: Judges issue bench warrants for an individual who has failed
to appear for a court appearance.

Department of Corrections: The state agency responsible for running
California's prison system and supervising parolees. The DOC's
parolee-at-large program goes after parolees who have violated their parole
or committed new crimes.

Department of Justice: The state's chief law enforcement agency operates
the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CELTS), a network
of databases that contain information about felons and suspects.

Wanted Persons System: A database maintained by the Department of Justice
and tracks individuals with outstanding warrants.

Automated Warrant Sytem: A regional database for tracking outstanding
warrants issued by Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara
counties, as well as the city of Benicia.

CHART:

CALIFORNIA'S AT-LARGE POPULATION

California is inundated with more than 2.5 million unserved warrants -
legal commands by the courts to take an individual into custody. Most of
the warrants are for minor offenses, but tens of thousands are for violent
crimes such as murder, rape and assault. Almost no one is looking for these
warrant scofflaws, who prowl the streets without fear of arrest.

CALIFORNIA

Total unserved felony and misdemeanor warrants: 2.5 million

No one in California keeps an accurate count of how many unserved warrants
exist. This is an estimate by the California Board of Corrections, which
polled the state's counties, as of December 1998.

Wanted persons: 681,668

California's Department of Justice maintains a Wanted Persons System
database, but it tracks only individuals being sought on felonies and
"serious" misdemeanor warrants, as of February 1999.

Wanted felony suspects: 222,868

Individuals listed with the Wanted Persons System for outstanding felony
warrants, as of February 1999.

SELECTED FELONY WARRANTS

Individuals listed with the Wanted Persons System for various outstanding
felony warrants, as of February 1999.

Outstanding warrants

Homicide 2,690

Kidnapping 530

Sexual assault 1,470

Assault 6,699

Robbery 3,854

Burglary 13,205

Fraud 9,742

Dangerous drugs 74,017

Sex offenses 3,030

Weapons/explosions 2,498

Parole violation 20,671

BAY AREA

Outstanding warrants provided by county sheriffs and the Automated Warrants
System, as of February 1999.

[continued at part two]