Taking a Gigabyte or Two Out of Crime

Not being old enough to gaze upon the Chicken Boy or the sad remains of the two-headed calf at the sideshows of fairs that visited our Corn Belt town, I had to content myself with other marvels, the most marvelous of them the Lord’s Prayer written on a grain of rice.

That wouldn’t astound a 5-year-old nowadays, when there is more information in the computer chip of a Gameboy than existed in the ancient Egyptian library at Alexandria. The megabyte and gigabyte and terabyte--the stored equivalent of a million books--are the techno-culture’s grains of rice.

So why the need, in this micro-day and age, for the Municipal Court’s plan, as outlined in its notice this month to the Los Angeles city attorney, to purge more than 120,000 outstanding warrants from its paper and computerized files?

“Records destruction is part of the court’s continuing records management program and is necessary to provide adequate storage for both immediate and future needs,” the memo reads. Considerately, the doomed files will be sent to the city attorney’s office at the rate of only 10,000 every two months for the next two years.

From the first batch of 10,000 cases, some as old as 1987, the city attorney has until May 13 to scrutinize each one and file a written motion on every warrant it doesn’t want dismissed.

If only they really were files. This first batch is just 20 pages of numbers--no names, nothing about the crime, just case numbers and how many defendants. Not a clue about whether it’s speeding tickets or child abuse.

So many numbers, so small they might even fit on a grain of rice.

*

From the court clerk’s side of the counter, it looks like spring cleaning, but to prosecutors, it looks like 120,000 “get out of jail free” cards.

Most could be nothing but old traffic tickets, minor offenses that, like neglected sore throats turned septic, get nasty and expensive to clear up. (To civil libertarians, these are the very kind of warrants used to justify some so-called “driving while black/brown” police stops.)

But in the mix there are some warrants for crimes that are no sissy misdemeanors--spouse-beating, gang violations.

“I understand we should sometimes purge traffic warrants because they overload the system,” says City Atty. James Hahn, whose staff is looking into appealing this avalanche. “But they’re doing it in a way that totally frustrates our ability to evaluate whether this is a case that’s important. A lot of these involve cases where we had convictions, sometimes after a hard-fought jury trial, and the defendant never came back for sentencing.

“These can’t be treated cavalierly. The justice system should be meaningful. Just to make life more convenient for bureaucrats in the court clerk’s office shouldn’t be what this is all about.”

Hahn cites the case of Vijay Sharma, one of the city’s most notorious slumlords, who skipped the country after he was convicted of 112 criminal misdemeanors. Nearly nine years later, he was finally arrested with his outstanding warrant, which these days might have been zapped from the system.

A million and a half times every day, California cops tappity-tap a name or a license number into an inboard computer and an outstanding warrant may appear, one out of the 2.6 million, 90% of them misdemeanors, floating out there. And no cop, says Hahn, wants to walk up to the door of someone who has a warrant on his head and not know it.

Why aren’t a million doors being hammered on to serve these?

In part because the public insists on seeing its crime-fighting tax dollars at work, visible police, visible policing. Yanking cops off hot calls to serve warrants could cut into response time, and someone’s political hide would get flayed over it.

State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer has been laboring on legislation to get the backlog unclogged. Too many bad guys, too many millions of dollars in traffic fines are getting away.

The paper crapshoot, says Lockyer spokesman Nathan Barankin, sends a signal that “if you think California doesn’t find it important enough to arrest you after the first crime, what’s going to stop you from committing a second?”

*

The county’s Municipal and Superior courts have just merged, but not all marriages make for equal partners. The district attorney gets the particulars on the few felony warrants facing dismissal; the city attorney gets those pages and pages of numbers.

“We’d like the same kind of heads-up as the D.A. gets,” says Hahn. Can’t be done, says the court clerk--too cumbersome, too time-consuming.

If a kid’s toy can store a megabyte of data, the courts should have a few terabytes of their own, so that purging a file can be done in the interest of justice, not in the interest of just not enough room.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.