D.A. Targets Scofflaws in Drunk-Driver Cases

Despite the get-tough laws and rhetoric of the 1980s, a huge number of people arrested for drunk driving in Los Angeles County have escaped paying a fine or serving jail time simply because the county marshal’s office has not been able to find them.

Upwards of 100,000 bench warrants for the arrest of these drunk-driving suspects--issued by judges after the suspects did not show up in court or failed to pay their fines--have never been served, officials estimate.

Weeklong Sweep

To publicize the extent of the problem and to encourage greater public cooperation, 32 deputy marshals and district attorney investigators on Tuesday began a weeklong sweep, attempting to arrest 2,000 drunk-driving suspects on outstanding bench warrants.

San Diego County Marshal Michael Sgobba has no plans for a similar roundup. Although his office has no statistics on outstanding drunk-driving warrants, Sgobba said Tuesday, he doubts that they make up a large portion of the county’s backlog of more than 330,000 unserved warrants.

“If we were to conduct a study on the volume of drunk-driving arrests that go to warrant for failures-to-appear, I feel it would be much lower than for other misdemeanors,” he said. “The run-of-the-mill drunk driver is in every other respect a law-abiding citizen and does take care of his obligations more than others.”

Besides, he said, the county’s jails are so crowded that if his marshals rounded up large numbers of scofflaws, the Sheriff’s Department would turn them away at the jailhouse door.

The Los Angeles sweep, the first of its kind, was proposed by the district attorney’s office to frighten drivers as the holiday season approaches.

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, whose staff invited television crews and newspaper photographers to record Tuesday’s arrests, said he hopes that scenes of ordinary residents being arrested for evading justice “will have a chilling effect. Maybe . . . people leaving dinner with too much to drink . . . will give the car keys to someone who isn’t as sloshed as they are.”

By the end of the day, 116 people had been arrested at their homes or business.

However, in terms of cleaning up the county’s backlog of approximately 224,000 bench warrants for all crimes, the sweep is a drop in the bucket.

County Marshal Robert Mann said his 70 warrant officers, who spend their time tracking down and arresting scofflaws, cannot keep up with the pace of newly issued bench warrants.

‘Shoveling Against Tide’

“You’re always shoveling the sand against the tide,” Mann said.

During the last 12 months, county judges issued 144,859 warrants for the arrest of people who had jumped bail or otherwise had failed to comply with the orders of a court. (In some cases, two or more warrants are for different crimes allegedly committed by the same person.) The marshal’s office served 72.6% of those warrants, but that left nearly 40,000 “under investigation,” joining the backlog.

The size of the backlog troubles criminal justice authorities because it provides hope to many suspects that they can escape punishment.

Mann said his office does not keep separate statistics on bench warrants for drunk-driving suspects, but said he believes that they make up the majority of bench warrants--as much as 70% of all warrants issued by judges in some areas of the county.

The rest are for suspects in crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, such as assault or drug-related cases. A separate district attorney’s unit handles warrants issued in family support cases.

Mann said his staff has grown increasingly efficient in clearing warrants but has been unable to make a dent in the backlog because the number of staff members assigned to warrants has not increased.

Static Since 1981

The marshal’s office has about the same number of warrant officers as it did in 1981, when the Board of Supervisors raised the number from 22 to 64 in an effort to clean up the backlog.

Drunk-driving arrests in Los Angeles County have remained relatively constant during that time, from a high of 110,712 in 1983 to a low of 100,455 last year. About half of these cases are prosecuted by the district attorney’s office, the rest by city attorneys.

Mann and several of the warrant officers who are working this week’s sweep said their work is complicated by the mobility of the people they are trying to find.

“These people don’t necessarily give good addresses, or they move a lot, or they hide,” Mann said. “When we get a warrant from the courts, we usually work it intensively for the first few weeks. If it gets us nowhere--no personal contact or direct contact with someone the suspect is living with--then we just hold it in our files.”

Some May Give Up

Dave Roldan, a warrant officer who, as usual, had been on the job since 5 a.m. Tuesday, said he believes that some people with outstanding bench warrants may turn themselves in voluntarily if they become convinced that the odds of arrest are growing.

“Some of these people are simply afraid of being arrested,” Roldan said. Others “are playing the system out as far as they can.”

Arlene Joye, victims services director for the Los Angeles chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said she welcomes the publicity value of the drunk-driver sweep.

“A lot of people who commit the crime view it as an infraction, not a potentially violent crime,” she said.