BY TANYA BRICKING
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Frustrated by a backlog of more than 115,000 people with outstanding warrants in Hamilton County, authorities are cracking down again. Beginning May 1, police will begin arresting people who skip court even once. It used to take a new charge to get someone with one outstanding warrant arrested.
"It's the same process that we've been going through trying to reduce the number of outstanding warrants," said Hamilton County Municipal Judge Mark Schweikert, who often presides in a court where 35 percent of the people on his docket fail to show up.
The push to lower the number of outstanding warrants has changed from going after severe offenders to pursuing even minor ones. Police asked the Enquirer last fall to publish names of people with 10 or more outstanding warrants. That reduced the list slightly -- last year the backlog reached as high as 120,000 -- but court workers are still overwhelmed with reprocessing old cases.
Hamilton County's municipal court will be holding special hearings Wednesday afternoons and Mondays if necessary to deal only with outstanding warrant cases.
Most are misdemeanors and should not lead to jail crowding, Judge Schweikert said.
"The message is the holiday's over," he said. "Now you have to show up for your trial date. And the expectation is we'll save a lot of money because we won't have to continue to reprocess these warrants."
