2009: ELPD utilizes warrant initiative to arrest offenders

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More than 150 criminals with outstanding warrants were brought to justice by the East Lansing Police Department in 2009.

The 154 arrests were part of an outstanding warrants initiative. There were 199 total outstanding warrants, but some offenders were arrested with multiple warrants, said East Lansing Police Sgt. Scott Wriggelsworth.

Wriggelsworth said the initiative started in 2008 to keep up with the warrants.

The department receives a list of all outstanding warrants within a two-week time period, and through the daily routine of on-duty officers, would track down criminals.

The initiative had made it more routine to check outstanding warrants, rather than just occasionally seeing updated lists or by chance arresting someone who already has an outstanding warrant, Wriggelsworth said.

East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert said the initiative not only gets criminals off the streets, it also makes operations in the department run smoother.

“We are a college town — we have a transient population,” he said.

“We want to make sure that a warrant or a legal issue gets taken care of before someone moves somewhere else. It’s just a lot more efficient.”

Wriggelsworth said a lot of people with outstanding warrants were in trouble because of simple traffic violations. He said when the police would approach people with outstanding warrants, most were cooperative.

“We encourage them to take care of them on their own but we’ll certainly take care of it for them,” he said.

Some students said they felt indifferent toward the initiative because they didn’t know there were so many criminals to arrest.

“I felt (East Lansing) was pretty safe already,” zoology senior Courtney Ploehn said.

The focus of the initiative, however, is to make people more accountable for their criminal actions and to bring people to justice, Wriggelsworth said.

“I got into police work in 1994 to arrest bad guys and to make sure people are held accountable,” he said. “If we’re letting these warrants just sit until we stumble across these people, we could sit a year or two, or three years and no one has come to justice.”

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