Baltimore Sun's police reporter Justin Fenton spent time with the deparment's warrant squad on Wednesday and learned that they are now going after people with a propensity for violence but wanted on minor offenses. See his story here.

This helps not only to clear a backlog of open arrest warrants but hopefully will clear the streets of some unwanted people as well. Warrant service is not the most glamorous beat -- as Justin's story points out, the cops spend more time sorting through tangles of relationships to determine where their suspect might be staying than speeding down city streets with lights and sirens blaring.

But it's also one of the most important jobs. Too often, warrants aren't discovered until after the person has been arrested or pulled over by police. Of course, by then, he or she's already committed another crime. Police in Justin's story are working off a list of 500 people.

I'm not sure how many outstanding warrants there are in the city anymore, but this is certainly not a new problem. In 2000, police discovered 51,000 unserved warrants -- 260 were for murder or attempted murder -- sitting in file drawers. And that was after having discovered 42,000 unserved warrants in 1996.

City police created a task force to do nothing but hunt down wanted people. I'll seek out the number of unserved warrants still on file today and report back. But I'm presuming that if city cops are now targeting some of the low-level offenders that we at least are going after those accused of top-tier crimes, such as murder.

Warrant squads were a central piece of a crime plan that helped drive down the numbers in New York and was copied here in Baltimore when NYPD commander Ed Norris took over the department. Back in 2000, I recall a police commander standing in front of the television cameras unfolding a 8-incch stack of paper containing 26,000 names -- just half the list. Many or most no longer lived at the addresses on the sheets, or had died, or had an incorrect date of birth listed.

One of the names was of a woman who had been charged with killing someone 31 years earlier; the oldest unserved warrant dated back to Oct. 6 1969.