I was under the impression that when authorities in the U.S. have an arrest warrant, they then execute it quite quickly (i.e. go to the person’s home and arrest him/her right there,) but apparently there are warrants that aren’t executed like that - the authorities wait for the person to go to a place like an airport, or get pulled over for a traffic stop, and only then run the person’s driver’s license or ID through the system and arrest them when they find that the name pops up on the list.
Is there a specific legal category here - ‘passive’ arrest warrants versus ‘active’ arrest warrants?
My assumption is that when they file a warrant, that will get them flagged if they encounter law enforcement anywhere, but if they also think they know where the person is, they’ll try to go get them. If he’s not there, they kinda have to just wait to see if he shows up… Maybe surveil where he was thought he might be. If they have no idea where he is, what else can they do?
As far as I’ve always dealt with a warrant is a warrant. Of course you aren’t going to spend as much manpower going after someone who didn’t pay a parking ticket as you would a murder suspect. It’s a matter of tactics and strategy rather than a legal definition.
The Department of Defense will report deserters and thus a federal warrant will be out for their arrest. How much effort is expended in getting one particular deserter arrested? It really depends on what other legal issues the deserter faces. If they’ve just up and cut and run, then the extent of the effort is just that: reporting. Nothing will happen until and unless the deserter has, as the military puts it, interaction with law enforcement. The active warrant will appear and then the appropriate procedures (arrest, etc.) will be followed. Military Law Center (civilian firm for service members facing military justice) has a good explanation of what happens when someone is declared a deserter.
I’m in a large metro area. For people that don’t pay a traffic ticket and other minor infractions we spend zero time looking for them.
But over the years I have taken part-time patrol gigs in smaller towns just for shits & giggles. If the person was local, yeah, we would go to their house for an unpaid cite. I went into a high school once to hunt down a 16 year old who didn’t pay a speeding write up. “You either need to give me $56 or I have to arrest you and your parents will have to bail you out”. About 15 kids passed the hat around and came up with the cash. I gave him a receipt and took the money back to the municipal court.
Shoulda seen the look of horror on his face. I’ll bet he never went over the limit again. And I’ll bet he had never told his parents about that ticket and was hoping if he ignored it it would go away. BTW, I wasn’t the one that had cited him. I was just working at the muni court that day and he didn’t show up.
Related to different kinds of warrants I was “arrested” once in a weird way. I had gone to purchase a hand gun and the background check was taking forever so I told the shop owner I would come back the next day since I had to go to a hunter’s safety course
About 15 minutes into the course I was called to the back of the room by the instructor where I was met by two officers who told me I was under arrest on what they called a catch and release warrant. After telling me that they said I was free to go but that I should take care of my failure to appear. After talking with the officers more it seems my background check had brought my name up in their system and the gun shop owner told them where to find me.
Long story short the warrant was a paperwork mix-up and the judge who issued it had canceled it the same day but had never notified the police.
My question is what type of warrant would be important enough for the cops to track me down but unimportant enough to immediately release me? I doubt legally there is a catch and release warrant.
That’s police jargon, not the official term of the warrant.
It has to do with how the warrant is worded. If it says something to the effect "A peace officer having contact with said subjectSHALLarrest the subject on the authority of this warrant" then I have no choice. It is an order to take you into custody and if I let you go I am in contempt.
If the warrant is written to say something to the effect "A peace officer having contact with said subjectMAYarrest the subject on the authority of this warrant" then I have the option of letting you go, hence the catch and release tag. These types of warrants are for petty offense like failure to pay a traffic citation fine. If I pull you over and find you have a warrant like this I can just advise you about the warrant and suggest you pay your fines or next time you’ll be booked.
YMMV, BTW. Some departments SOP mandates all warrants, regardless how the order is written, result in arrest. But anyway, that’s my explination of catch and release to you.
Awesome. Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. In my case my dog jumped my fence and my check for the dog a large fine showed up after my court time so it probably was a may warrant.
It varies widely depending on the circumstances. For major felonies (especially murder), high profile crimes, or in quiet areas, police will often try to find the person and serve an arrest warrant. As departments get busier and the crime gets less severe, they will spend less effort on trying to arrest the person, and just let it sit in the system where the person will get arrested when they run into law enforcement somewhere. A lot of warrants are for something minor - a ton of warrants are for some flavor of ‘failure to appear’ in court over unpaid fines or tickets, for example, and the system has little reason to spend effort to bring the person in quickly.
Also, ‘go to the person’s house and arrest him/her right there’ is useless for a great many people who have warrants, as they don’t have a house or even a regular residence, and any address on file is just a technicality. I had my parent’s address on my driver’s license for several years because I’d move every six months or so and would just let the rare official papers go through them. I later lived in New York for bit over a year and since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t bother getting a NY license and just used my old one with my old address for ID. And I wasn’t living some kind of life of crime running with gangs or robbing banks, or an illegal immigrant with no valid ID, or someone trying to live ‘off the grid’, I was just a young adult who moved a lot and was lazy about doing paperwork I could get away with skipping.
They have an overwhelming workload, so only the most violent and high profile cases are pursued vigorously.
Google: “According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, which police use for background checks on suspects, there are more than 789,000 outstanding warrants for felonies and serious misdemeanors filed in their system, but the actual number of warrants in the United States is actually much higher.”
A colleague of mine had a bizarre experience when something called a “bench warrant” was issued for him. He had two documents related to motor vehicles expire within a short time of each other. (One of these was an international driver’s license–he had been living outside the U.S. for years as a civil servant. I don’t know whether this complicated things). But he didn’t receive notice of them, because there was a fire in his apartment building, and the mailings weren’t forwarded to him in the apartment he had been relocated to. He subsequently received some communication which directed him to report to a police station and turn himself in, which he did.
This is a warrant a judge issues from the bench, hence the name. Many times a judge will issue one when someone doesn’t appear at a court date or if the judge finds out someone has violated terms of their bail.
It differs from other warrants as they are not usually applied for by the police or DA.
I got pulled over years ago after a friend and I left her house. A black van followed us ( I didn’t notice it). I was driving down a wide street when all of a sudden the van lit up. I pulled over and the officers wearing full SWAT gear got both of us out of my car and questioned us separately. I asked what I had done and he replied, “You did not signal to pull over to the right.” I looked around and told him it was a one lane street, just a wide one. (Today it is one lane in each direction and a center turn lane.) After a bit more questions he said someone had called in that drugs were being sold there possibly by the renter she had at the time.
But the point is he did not try to directly stop us until he had a bogus reason with such flimsy “evidence”
Interesting story, but I fail to see what it has to do with the OP’s question regarding warrants. Your post is more about reasonable suspicion and probable cause, not an actual warrant.
In my state a warrant is a warrant is a warrant. They can come into being in a few ways but you will get arrested on them regardless of their origin.
As explained above a judge can issue what is sometimes referred to as a bench warrant but is called a warrant in my state. It’s generally for failure to appear for a court proceeding. When you get arrested the offense will be listed as contempt of court. There is usually bail attached to the warrant. Notice is mailed to you but no one is coming to hunt you down. You will get picked up eventually. This usually originates at the municipal judge level.
Warrants for child support come from the county level and usually have no bail. He stays in jail until he see a superior court judge. Again the offense is contempt of court.
Criminal charges are either put on a summons or a warrant depending on many factors. There is no bail on a warrant. When a warrant is issued attempts are made to find the suspect. Towns where he might be are notified. If he is not found and the charge is not very serious then there won’t be much more effort put in. He will run into a cop before too long.
For serious crimes the county fugitive task force is given the warrant the execute. If it appears the suspect may have left the state they may ask the US Marshalls for help.
I recall an article, maybe 10 or 20 years ago, about arrest warrants in Ontario (Canada). The complaint was from British Columbia. What was happening was that undesirables committing low-level crimes (minor thefts, drug possession, etc.) were either encouraged to leave Ontario while awaiting trial, or figured out they might as well. Often, they ended up in British Columbia (nice climate), where typically Vancouver or Victoria police might interact with them. Then they would call the Ontario authorities and say “we have your criminal, come get him”. Rather than pay a round trip airline ticket for the officer, and one way for the criminal, they would say “we don’t care” with the additional message “if we catch him in Ontario, he will go to trial”. After a while it looked like Ontario was just using that intimidation to dump its deplorables on BC. To counter this, BC decided it would start paying to transport criminals back to Ontario and pass them on to police, thus getting the message across “don’t run away from a warrant to BC”.
IANAL but… As I understand, the problem in the USA is each state is a separate criminal jurisdiction, and someone arrested in one state needs to be extradited(?) to the one with the warrant out. (unless it is federal?) In Canada, all criminal law is federal, so the only issue is transporting the arrestee to the site of the trial. The problem is, the provinces run the courts and absorb the related costs.
Yes, if you’re arrested in Nevada for a warrant in California, California has to extradite you. Normally states don’t choose to extradite for misdemeanor warrants or bench warrants, but there are exceptions (drunk driving cases, for example). An extradition does require a trial unless the defendant waives the trial, but it’s a pretty quick one most of the time - some newsworthy cases get complicated extradition proceedings, like if someone kills people in multiple states. In some cases, transporting the prisoner will be done on an airline, which I’ve heard can be interesting for the LEOs involved.
I work in the juvenile detention system. How warrants are executed can vary quite bit depending on the specific circumstances. The seriousness of the charge can definitely make it more likely that officers actively search for the person.
Sometimes officers will sort out a batch of warrants for people likely to show up at the same place, and they just wait and watch. With juveniles, that can consist of making sure the school resource officers look out for certain teens to show up at school.
If there are quite a few warrants accumulating in a jurisdiction and there isn’t a lot of other police business to take care of, sometimes officers may make a push to more actively pursue a batch of them to clear them off the list. Some warrants are limited as only being valid for a certain area, such as a particular state or group of states in the USA. Sometimes the court will change its mind after a person has been picked up on a warrant, such as if the original offense was minor and it would be a long drive to go get the person. In that situation, the court may quash the warrant and tell whoever has the person in custody to let them go.
There are probably a lot of other variations in how warrants are executed if you compare the practices and statutes from one county to another, or one state to another in the USA.
Do they even care? My step-sister’s friend in Idaho, for example, regularly drove to California. She mentioned she no longer drove through Oregon, because there were two outstanding speeding tickets there and she didn’t feel like paying them. It sounds like she was pretty confident that California and Idaho (and Nevada) didn’t care about speeding ticket warrants. This was back around 1990, so possibly too the computer systems didn’t carry out-of-state ticket info back then? Also she was about 75 years old so maybe some cops would not care to arrest her for out-of-state speeding tickets?
How hard do they have to look to find outstanding warrants? Are they all shared in one super-interstate system that most traffic cops have in the car in most states?