There are 5,200 outstanding arrest warrants in Northern Ireland, including 50 people suspected of sex crimes, police have revealed.
Around 4,000 of those were issued prior to 2009 before a new computerised filing system - Causeway - was introduced within the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the Policing Board was told.
Warrants are typically ordered by a judge when an individual fails to turn up for a scheduled court appearance.
Assistant Chief Constable George Hamilton acknowledged that the number outstanding was “too high”.
“I am not suggesting that our management of warrants has been to the standard that we would have hoped for or would have expected,” he said.
“We are where we are with this, the 5,000 figure is too high, we are dealing with that in a proactive way and in a prioritised manner, we now have the technology in place around Causeway and so on.”
Mr Hamilton said there were no outstanding warrants for individuals wanted for murder or attempted murder.
He said those wanted in relation to serious assaults was “small”.
However he added: “We have about 50 people outstanding on warrants that pertain to sexual offending, we are not complacent about this.”
He explained those individuals would not be on the sex offenders register as they had yet to go through the court process.
Mr Hamilton said police went after those individuals considered to pose most risk first.
He added: “You need to bear in mind as well of course by virtue of the fact that a warrant exists it says something about the individual that is subject to that warrant - they generally don’t want to be found, they don’t want to be brought to account for their actions and therefore generally speaking fail to appear in court at a pre-arranged summons date or for their trial.”
The police had been quizzed about the issue of warrants by independent Policing Board member Brian Rowntree.
Chief Constable Matt Baggott said his officers were also being asked to deal with warrants relating to fines, suggesting those matters could be dealt with by another agency in order to free up more police time.
“Many of our systems have got clogged with the sheer bulk of things that in the UK elsewhere the police simply wouldn’t be asked to do,” he said.
“And there is a big issue, a big discussion at the moment about how you can build an enforcement arm for justice that deals with very routine matters and allow the police to deal with the most serious.”
PA