New system to handle court warrants

A new Garda system to handle court warrants — including the some 120,000 warrants outstanding — will deal with cases similar to ones highlighted in the Garda inspectorate report.

Bench warrants:

Case 1: A garda warrant office had 20 warrants for a person who could not be identified. There were no fingerprints or addresses. Requests were sent across the country asking districts for any information that could help to identify the person. In one case of shop- lifting in 2006, the arresting garda was unable to remember the case. To date, 18 of the 20 warrants have been cancelled and it is unlikely that the other two warrants will be progressed.

Case 2: There was an eight-year-old bench warrant for theft, but there were no fingerprints, photos, or other identification for the person. The arresting garda was unable to recall the incident. The warrant remains unexecuted.

Case 3: A person was stopped in a car and provided false details to gardaí. It was established that the driver did not have insurance and was arrested and the car was seized. The driver was later released, without executing two bench warrants and nine penal warrants.

Case 4: A garda stopped a person and later completed an intelligence report on Pulse, the Garda computer incident system. The garda stated that after dealing with the subject and letting him go, he discovered that the person was wanted on warrant. On a later occasion, the same garda stopped the same person and entered another intelligence record, with the same reason for not arresting.

Penal warrants

Case 1: A persistent female offender in a rural division was regularly arrested for thefts from shops and other offences. She was charged and usually given a fine in court. She didn’t pay the fines and a penal warrant was issued.

Local gardaí were unable to convince the woman to pay up and eventually she was arrested on a number of penal warrants.

The offender needed to be taken to a female prison, in Dublin. Because a prison van was unavailable, she was brought by three gardaí to Dublin. All three gardaí were lost to frontline policing for the day. They will also incur expenses as they were away from their district.

Case 2: A male was arrested in Dublin and taken to a nearby prison, escorted by gardaí. On arrival back to the station, the officers found a coat left by the person on the back seat of the patrol car. One of the gardaí went to the person’s home address to leave the coat with relatives, but was met at the door by the person who had already arrived back from the prison.

Case 3: A warrant unit arrested a male on three penal warrants with 225 days in prison attached. At the time of the arrest the unit had only located one of the warrants and the offender was taken to prison. The sergeant from the warrant unit located the other two penal warrants and later the same day drove to the prison to hand them over. By the time the sergeant arrived the person had already been released.