MERRILLVILLE, Ind. -- Lake County authorities face a list of some 12,000 arrest warrants for people charged with a crime but who are walking free because officers had never tracked them down.
Many of the warrants are from crimes that happened several years ago -- and about 3,600 of them are for felony allegations, authorities said.
Lake County Police Department spokesman Mike Higgins said the agency has officers in a warrant division who arrest six to 10 suspects daily.
The department receives more than 5,000 new warrants every year, including for probation violations and failing to appear in court, said.
''We have four guys whose job it is to serve these, and they never get caught up,'' Higgins told the Post-Tribune for a story Sunday.
Vernita Taylor of Gary was stopped last month for a minor traffic violation, but was soon arrested on a nearly 19-year-old warrant for attempted murder.
''It was a shock to me,'' Taylor said of her arrest. ''I witnessed what happened and told the police what I saw that night. They let me go after that; they didn't arrest me.''
Taylor, now 45, lives at the same Gary address she gave police officers the night of the 1985 attack.
In all that time, Taylor said, police officers have never tried to serve the warrant.
Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said his office dismissed the charges when Taylor appeared in court on March 2 because she did not participate in the attack.
''There's no reason why this didn't go away a long time ago,'' Carter said. ''It's a system failure.''
Lake County is not alone in having a backlog of unserved warrants.
Ryan Jones, a spokesman for the neighboring Porter County Police Department, said that agency had about 3,500 outstanding criminal warrants on file.
The backlog in northwestern Indiana is being addressed, in part, by a new federal task force specializing in warrant arrests.
U.S. Marshal David Murtaugh, in charge of the Great Lakes Task Force, said the Chicago group was formed in July and was one of only five in the country.
Murtaugh said the task force, which include marshals and state and local police officers, have served 600 warrants in seven months -- more than 200 in northwestern Indiana.
''The concept is to help state and local departments get their violent fugitives,'' Murtaugh said. ''We come in to assist, we can focus on the suspect, set up surveillance, whatever we need to do.''
One of the suspects they arrested was a man charged with attempted murder after authorities said he ran over Lake Station police Sgt. Scott Garzella last month.
The task force has obtained agreements with 32 county police departments in northern Indiana to work with them to find violent felons, Murtaugh said. When suspects move beyond the city or county where the crime was committed, police departments often do not have the manpower to keep up the chase, he said.
''We'll go anywhere,'' Murtaugh said.
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