Sheriff's Department Deals with Backlog of Unserved Warrants

The Winston County Sheriff's Office is not only having to deal with an increase in property crime and assault cases within the County, but a large number of unserved warrants have recently been provided to the office from the Justice Court System that will require a significant number of man hours.
Acting Sheriff David Edwards indicates that the Spring and Summer months have brought an increase in thefts across the County. The majority of these involve mobile, easily disposed of items such as 4-wheelers, trailers and lawn mowers. The thefts average 3-5 a day which puts a strain on the limited staff of officers and investigators. Edwards also states that personal assaults including sexual assaults are on the rise.
The Office was recently authorized by the Board of Supervisors to add an additional part-time investigator to the staff to ease the workload. The Board also authorized the conversion of a part-time employee to full-time to work the large number of warrants recently provided by the court system.
The Sheriff's Office was already working a backlog of warrants provided earlier this year when an additional 6 years of warrants were added to the pile. Edwards estimates that these warrants likely exceed $3 million in unpaid fees and fines. A now fulltime employee is working to locate the individuals named in the warrants. Unfortunately, many of these individuals were either not residents of the county or state or have since left the area making the serving of a warrant difficult if not impossible.
Edwards indicated that a new Justice Court Clerk took over the position in January and discovered the backlog within the Court system. As an example, a traffic fine may have not been paid, the state may have been contacted to suspend the individual's license but a warrant was not issued in a timely manner at the local level. These are not warrants that sat on someone's desk for 6 years. They were not fully processed through the system and were only recently provided to the Sheriff's Department by the Justice Court.
The department will likely only be able to collect a small percentage of the fees and fines associated with these warrants but even this could have a significant financial impact.
W. McCully