Thousands of misdemeanor warrants not pursued for years

Warrants detective Gennaro Scarfogliero pounded on the door of the third floor apartment, each knock louder than the last.

Inside, there were muffled sounds of movement.

In a booming voice, the detective told 23-year-old Dequandrae Jones that the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office was there on a warrant for his arrest.

No answer.

With keys borrowed from the apartment complex's maintenance man, Scarfogliero and a deputy let themselves in. Minutes later, Jones came out in handcuffs.

"I was sleeping, man," said Jones, arrested Friday on charges of burglary and battery.

"You were hiding in the closet," Scarfogliero replied.

With Jones' arrest, the sheriff's office cleared one outstanding warrant out of 33,000 still active in Hillsborough County.

Detectives prioritize cases to get the most violent offenders off the streets, Scarfogliero said.

Misdemeanor warrants number in the thousands and sometimes the offenses are so minor they sit idle in databases for years because law enforcement has limited resources to pursue them.

That's what happened in the case of Dontae Morris.

The warrants process has been under scrutiny since two Tampa police officers attempted to arrest him during a June 29 traffic stop. Morris was wanted on misdemeanor warrants out of Jacksonville.

The officers were shot to death at close range, investigators said, which led to the biggest manhunt in the city's history.

During the search for Morris, Tampa police questioned why he was released from prison in April despite having the outstanding warrants for worthless checks.

That, and other factors that came to light later, made the issue of Morris' warrants more complex.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said the warrants should not have been issued because Morris was in prison when three worthless checks in his name were written in 2008.

If Morris had been brought to Jacksonville on the worthless check warrants, he would have been immediately released from jail because there was no evidence to support the charges, the Duval County State Attorney's Office said.

Even if Morris had been the person who issued the checks and was arrested on the warrants, he would have been released on his own recognizance, or had a low bond set, because of the nonviolent nature of the crime, Jacksonville prosecutors said.

Hillsborough handles minor, nonviolent warrant cases the same way, Cpl. Tony Vidal of the sheriff's warrants division said.

People arrested in other jurisdictions on misdemeanor battery, failure to appear in court and other minor charges usually won't be extradited back to Hillsborough because the level of the offense doesn't justify the cost of sending detectives to pick up the suspect, Vidal said.

Misdemeanor warrants have bail amounts of no more than $500, Douglas Covington, a Hillsborough State Attorney's Office bureau chief said.

"It just ensures you come to court," he said. "It's very, very rare to extradite someone on a misdemeanor. In these economic times - and other jurisdictions may disagree with me - the state doesn't have the funding to do this."

Kirby Rainsberger, the legal adviser for the Tampa Police Department, said he is investigating why those minor warrants from Jacksonville remained in law enforcement databases four days after Morris' arrest.

"We just want to get to the bottom of everything we can out of this case," Rainsberger said. "None of us really know how or why or in what sequence it happened. We just want to know."

Tampa police Chief Jane Castor said she understands the warrants were issued in error. But, she said, "any errors made do not negate the fact that Dontae Morris is solely responsible for the deaths of Officers David Curtis and Jeff Kocab, nor will it bring them back."

Morris has been indicted on four counts of first degree murder, two for the officers' deaths and the other two for Derek Anderson and Harold Wright.

Vidal said he can't comment or speculate about Morris' minor warrants because it is not his agency's case.

Although the county's 14 warrants detectives will try to find people wanted for petty theft, DUI, failure to pay child support and other minor offenses, the priority is on suspects of violent crimes, Vidal said.

Those suspects are typically repeat offenders.

"There's nobody new out there," Vidal said. "They're the same guys. Ten percent of people commit 90 percent of the crimes."

Scarfogliero, a nine-year veteran of the sheriff's warrants division, admits a big part of his job consists of clearing out a vast backlog of cases.

"We get so many warrants and it's such a workload," he said.

"Do we want to make arrests? Absolutely. But there's no way we can arrest all of them. We can't. You do the best with what you've got."

Between 100 to 200 new warrants come in every month, Scarfogliero said. So the backlog of 33,000 warrants is no surprise, he said.

Actually, it's an improvement.

"Once, we had more than 60,000 in the system," Scarfogliero said.

About 25,000 warrants were purged from the files of state attorneys and sheriff's detectives this year, Vidal said. Most of the warrants were decades old - like a minor battery charge from a bar brawl 10 years ago - or the wanted persons had died.

"Ten, 20 a month are cleared because of the death of the offender," Vidal said.

Sometimes detectives stop pursuing warrants because leads have dried up or the suspect moved to another state.

"We have to look for them and if we can't find them, hope another agency picks them up," Vidal said. "But if we really need to find you, we will find you."

Scarfogliero said that on some days, he can knock on 35 doors and find none of the suspects. On others, he could knock on five and arrest them all.

He starts the hunt at 6 a.m. The early start gives detectives the element of surprise, because most of the suspects are still asleep and groggy when they answer the door.

"You wake somebody up, they want to put on some pants and brush their teeth, you let them do it," Scarfogliero said. "You build a rapport with them. Some people don't do that. Some people hide in the closets."

The detective said he doesn't measure a successful day by the number of arrests he makes.

"A good day is when I go home the same way I came in," Scarfogliero said. "No cuts and no bruises."