John Moran, a police officer at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a Republican candidate for Anne Arundel County sheriff, has pledged to reduce the number of outstanding warrants in the county, a measure he says will drastically reduce crime.
In May, there were 11,914 outstanding criminal warrants in the county, according to the Anne Arundel County Sheriff?s Office. Moran, 42, has claimed publicly that there are even more outstanding warrants than that ? and he?s built his campaign around trying to reduce that number.
“The best thing that the sheriff?s department can do is to serve those warrants .. they have a lot of other duties … but the thing they can do to make the citizens safer is to serve those warrants,” he said.
Unlike some other sheriff?s offices ? like Carroll and Howard ? the Anne Arundel County sheriff?s office serves both the district and circuit court warrants. For comparison?s sake, the Baltimore County Sheriff?s Office currently has about 2,665 outstanding warrants, including circuit court and district court, said Baltimore County Sheriff R. Jay Fisher.
Moran?s Democratic opponent, Maj. Ron Bateman, the current chief deputy sheriff, says the county is already taking measures to reduce the number of outstanding warrants ? a difficult task, he said, since the office gets 600 to 1200 new warrants every month. In May, for instance, the office got about 1140 new warrants.
“Warrants are very important to me,” Bateman said.
Bateman said he has already started an internal audit of the county?s warrants, many of which are old, outdated or for minor violations. Some of the warrants he has come across in the audit are for dead people, he said. Bateman said when the audit is complete, he expects that about half of the warrants will be thrown out.
If elected sheriff, Bateman said he will create a task force with other law enforcement agencies to focus on issuing warrants for more serious crimes immediately.
Phyllis McDonald, assistant professor in the Division of Public Safety Leadership at Johns Hopkins University, said too many outstanding warrants can imply a “lack of social control,” which studies have shown leads to more crime.
“Just intuitively you know that if an agency is not issuing outstanding warrants ? particularly for serious felonies ? than that is obviously a danger. The message that is going out is that their is a lack of social control,” she said.
She also said that even not issuing a backlog of warrants for more minor crimes can create a “broken windows” effect ? meaning that a system that appears in disrepair begets more crimes.
“When warrants are not being served in a timely manner, there is a perception that nobody cares,” McDonald said.
