Sheriff's office seeks assistance with serving warrants
Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran is reaching out to all the other police agencies in the county for help in serving arrest warrants.
The sheriff's office, which has the responsibility of serving all warrants issued in the county, currently has about 17,950 of them on hand.
Chief of Administration Michael Blazincic said the vast majority of those warrants, 15,560, are for people who have failed to appear in court after being released on bond.
In spite of doubling the size of the warrants division from two deputies to four in Curran's first year in office, the number of outstanding warrants has not decreased much.
So Curran has sent a letter to all police chiefs in the county asking for their help in serving the warrants issued by their departments.
Blazincic said the departments are being asked to make arrests of wanted people as they can, and also to provide updated intelligence on the likely whereabouts of the wanted people.
He said some of the warrants were first issued in the late 1970s and early 1980s and fugitives have long since moved on from where they were then.
New investigator:ŒState's Attorney Michael Waller is getting more help in fighting cyber crime, and the bad guys are going to be paying for it.
Waller told the county board's Law and Judicial Committee this week that he is hiring a part-time investigator with "superior" computer skills for his office.
Waller said the investigator will train and assist others in the office with complicated investigations involving economic crime, identity theft, trading and selling of child pornography, child abuse and sophisticated drug conspiracies.
And the $35,000 needed to pay the investigator for 2008 will come from Waller's computer forfeiture fund, which is made up of assets taken from people convicted of computer-related crime.
Gift to courts:ŒThe Kids Korner children's waiting room at the Waukegan courthouse has been awarded $3,000 from the national Target store chain to help underwrite its gift book program.
Since the door to Kids Korner opened in 1994, each of the more than 200 children who stay there while their parents tend to court business leaves with a book to take home.
That is a lot of reading material, and for the second year in a row, the folks at Target are putting forward $3,000 to keep the supplies up.
"At Target, we are making a real difference every day through our grant-making program," a company official said in a statement. "We are proud to partner with the 19th Judicial Circuit as part as our ongoing commitment to give back to the communities."
Heard in the hallway: County board member David Stolman of Buffalo Grove is among the nine attorneys who have applied to be appointed to the latest associate judge opening in the county. Chief Judge David Hall said he expects the winning candidate to be named by the end of next month.