Missing Warrants Send Police on a Search for Clues : Law enforcement: Officials can’t explain how or by whom the records were deleted. In fact, there’s some conflict over just how many were purged.

It has become the tale of the missing warrants, a mystery riddled with twists and turns and ever-changing accounts.

Last Friday, a Long Beach police official said he thought all of Long Beach’s arrest warrants had been accidentally purged from the state Wanted Persons System about a month ago--meaning that if a Long Beach suspect was stopped by authorities outside Los Angeles County, officials would have no way of knowing the person was wanted in Long Beach.

Then a few hours later, the official, Cmdr. Jerry Lance, estimated that while 50,000 to 70,000 Long Beach warrants had been deleted from the state computer system, at least 20,000 warrants for suspects wanted on the most serious offenses remained in the state system.

Wednesday, police had a new figure. Lance said a state printout had revealed that only 2,402 warrants had been removed last fall, all but three of them for misdemeanors. He added that all have recently been re-entered into the state system.

Lance said the department was conducting “an in-depth investigation” to find out how the warrants were removed and why there were so many conflicting accounts about the number.

The 50,000-to-70,000 figure, Lance said, came from the department’s warrant staff. “Where they got that figure, I don’t know. Somebody came up with the figure, and it was like a snowball going down a hill.”

The question of who removed the warrants remains a mystery. Lance insisted that the police department did not delete them, but that state or county personnel mistakenly plucked them from the system as a result of a casual phone call from Long Beach police.

But the managers of the state system are adamant that they did not erase the warrants--either mistakenly or otherwise. “We did not do it,” emphasized Fred Wynbrandt, chief of the state Department of Justice’s Bureau of Criminal Information and Analysis.

Managers of the Los Angeles County warrant system, which is operated by the Sheriff’s Department and has access to the state system, could not be reached for comment.

Lance said the mix-up began last year when the warrant section was looking into ways of saving time and money by “reducing our having to pick up prisoners throughout the state. We wanted to pick up felons but didn’t want to pick up (people wanted) for misdemeanors” with a bail of less than $15,000.

“It was a manpower issue, It’s basically lack of manpower,” Lance explained, saying that the department couldn’t afford to send officers to far reaches of the state to fetch suspects wanted for minor offenses.

But Lance maintains that the department was simply considering removing warrants for lesser crimes. Although police made inquiries about how misdemeanor warrants could be erased from the state system, Lance said the department never made a formal request to have that done.

Still, he conceded that the department should have consulted with judges and prosecutors before considering a warrant removal. “We should have consulted (City Prosecutor John VanderLans) and we have established a procedure where this won’t happen in the future. They’re not our warrants,” Lance acknowledged, noting that the arrest warrants are issued by the courts.