TUESDAY, JUNE 19, 2001
Sheriff's latest addition is new division
By Ryan Good
Staff Writer
The Seneca County Sheriff's Office is starting a new division to take care of some old problems.
The Warrants and Transports division, led by Lt. Mark Derr, will oversee the serving of warrants and transportation of inmates, Sheriff Tom Steyer said.
"Their main function is to transport inmates from the jail to the courts and the various correctional facilities," Steyer said.
Another function is cleaning out the file cabinets.
"We started counting the number of warrants we had around the sheriff's office. We had somewhere close to 700," Steyer said.
"Some of them go back to the early '90s," he added.
Currently the sheriff's office is working with the municipal courts in Tiffin and Fostoria, the Seneca County Common Pleas Court, and the various prosecutors offices to see of some of the warrants are for cases that have already closed.
"We've sent notices out to all the courts in reference to the warrants we had in our drawers. A lot of them have been recalled, so we might end up with 500 warrants laying around," Steyer said. "We'll probably knock down a couple hundred just by going through the courts, cleaning up the ones that are no longer out there."
The workload for the road patrol will also be lessened with the new division.
"Currently, when (warrants) come in the road deputies take the warrants and they try to go out and serve them. The new ones keep on coming in, so they get pushed off to the back, plus they're answering calls on the road too. It's hard to keep up with all these things," Steyer said.
Part of the new division is a computer system at the jail with a database to keep track of all of the warrants, the courts they came from and the type of charge on the warrant.
Getting old warrants served and out of the way for new ones won't be an overnight process.
"I'm sure it's going to take a couple years to start knocking those things down because there is constantly more warrants coming in. Today they were busy just making the local transports," Steyer said.
He added that part of the burden can be lifted if people who know they have warrants out on them go to court to take care of them instead of having a deputy serve them with the charges.
Steyer said the new division will run with current deputies that work in the jail, requiring no extra manpower.