“Safe Surrenders” Sought On 1,800 Old Warrants

A woman called police to Lenox Street the other day to report a complaint. The officers thought they’d seen her face before — just hours before, on a wall.

They were right. The woman’s face had appeared on a new display on the bulletin-board at the back of the second-floor line-up room: a display of the ​“most wanted” New Haveners who have outstanding warrants for major crimes.

The officers, David Murgo and Jon Young, told the woman at the call last Wednesday that she was wanted on a felony assault charge dating from March. ​“She was calm. She said, ​‘I didn’t realize it,’” Young recalled. He and Murgo brought her to the police station and placed her under arrest.

One down, around 1,800 more to go.

Several arrests took place that way last week, thanks to a new campaign by the police department to slash a backlog of unserved warrants dating back, in some cases, to 1983.

The new photo board is one of a slew of tactics devised by Lt. Patricia Helliger, the department’s officer in charge of records, in conjunction with Sgt. Karl Jacobson, who heads the intelligence unit.

Their goal is twofold: Make sure dangerous criminals get off the street. And help the many more nonviolent offenders clear up their records and play a more productive role in society.

Years ago, cops generally set up stings to lure wanted people into arrests, noted Chief Dean Esserman. ​“There are still some people we have to go after” that way, he said. ​“Many people have small warrants. All we have to do is to work with them to surrender voluntarily.”

Helliger raised the problem about the backlog after a state audit earlier this year revealed the 1,800 unserved warrants, hundreds and hundreds of which the department needed to reenter into its system by hand. Some people actively duck turning themselves in, she said. In some cases, people slip through the cracks — they’ve moved, officers couldn’t find them to serve warrants, and their cases get buried under more pressing criminal investigations.

When Helliger announced the 1,800 number at a weekly police CompStat meeting, Esserman challenged her and Jacobson to come up with a plan.

After researching similar efforts in other states, they came up with a host of ideas:

• They put the most-wanted notices on the board not just at line-up but in the police lock-up as well.

Officers started taking cellphone photos of the notices before going out on their rounds. They discovered that some people they see everyday were wanted for crimes investigated by other officers. As they started making arrests, Helliger and Sgt. Darcy Siclari (pictured) made sure to remove the faces of arrestees and replenish the board with new faces. That has kept the officers checking the board anew throughout the week.

At the lock-up one day, a woman was brought in from the Niantic prison for a court appearance on a charge from another community. A marshal saw her face on a notice for an outstanding New Haven charge; she was listed under different last names in the two cases. Warrant served.

• Hilliger and Siclari have also prepared individualized binders for neighborhood walking cops with faces and details of people with outstanding warrants in their districts. The idea is to have officers go knock on doors when they have time.

• The department has started posting wanted notices on its website. Someone actually found his picture there and turned himself in, Helliger said. She’s getting out the word: ​“If you have a warrant, turn yourself in. It’s called New Haven, not Safe Haven.”

• Meanwhile, she is working with the state’s attorney’s office to cull through 800 to 900 outstanding warrants from between 2002 and 2007 involving nonviolent misdemeanors committed by people who haven’t caused any more trouble since. Once the state’s attorney gives the OK, the cops plan to work with ministers on a ​“Safe Surrender” campaign. They’ll try to get the word out neighborhood by neighborhood to people on the list to come in and get the warrants off their records by doing, say, four hours of community service. Marshals in Camden, N.J., ran a similar program, according to Helliger. She hopes to launch the campaign in coming weeks.

Clearing up those old cases helps the city in several ways, Helliger said: It takes violent criminals off the street. It helps the nonviolent minor offenders get jobs, credit, and in some cases it helps social services by having old warrants removed from their records. Someone who otherwise might have turned to crime now has the option to earn money legally, she noted.