Sixty-thousand outstanding arrest warrants? Just in Durham? Surely that had to be a sign of a criminal justice system long gone toward deterioration.

On a closer look, though, most of the warrants turned out to be for passing worthless checks, typically for small amounts of money. That's a concern to the merchants who have been stiffed, and of course it would have been better if the bad-check passers had been caught and made to pay up. But it's not as if a large number of the 60,000 folks being sought were wanted for crimes of violence.

Those who are on the loose while suspected of thuggery of course do need to be tracked down -- which means the authorities need tools adequate to the task.

As The N&O recently reported, the Durham district attorney's office is making a concerted effort to clear the warrant backlog, dismissing some old, minor charges to focus on more serous ones. They're also setting up a Central Warrant Control office so the city and county's law enforcement agencies will be able to communicate more effectively with each other.

Communications problems have been a widespread source of frustration among the police and courts. Information about fugitives doesn't get promptly entered into the right data bases. Criminal records sometimes aren't readily available to judges imposing sentences. Probation officers may not find out that people they're supervising have been arrested.

In many cases, the problems are computer-related. In Durham, for instance, arrest warrants are created and tracked by the police department, the sheriff's office, the clerk of court and the magistrate's office. But each uses different, incompatible computer software.

Call it a Tower of Babel effect. Addressing it will be expensive, locally and nationally. But how many times must crooks who are genuinely dangerous elude arrest before a proper investment is made?

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