LEWISTON – Like doctors in an emergency room – treating the worst cases first – local police routinely practice a kind of triage.

Catch the most dangerous crooks first.

The rest, mostly small-time violators who ignore fines or orders to appear in court, might wait years.

It’s a reality of limited budgets and manpower, said Michael Bussiere, deputy chief of the Lewiston Police Department.

On any given day, the department has outstanding warrants on hundreds of people, Bussiere said. Those numbers have surged as high as 1,500.

“Eventually, people do get picked up,” he said.

Sometimes, an out-of-town speeding ticket can turn into an arrest when the warrant pops up in a routine background check.

Sometimes, it takes something more.

On Monday, Lewiston police plan to go after four people who have so far eluded calls for their arrest.

Media partners WGME-TV and the Sun Journal plan to go along as police pluck several names from their backlog of fugitives and try to find them.

Details are scheduled to appear on the Monday evening newscast, on the Sun Journal Web site and in the Tuesday morning newspaper.

“The officers already do a good job of going after them,” said Bussiere, who understands that some people might be surprised that so many warrants may go unserved for a time.

However, the majority are less than two years old. And the worst cases rarely languish, he said.

A 2005 Sun Journal story discovered a still-pending warrant on a 27-year-old case, in which a warrant was issued for a woman who was accused of perjury.

Such cases are rare, Bussiere said.

“We don’t have any warrants in our file for murder,” he said. “Those fugitives would be tracked down until they were in custody.”

Typically, the warrants themselves catch up with people.

A simple background check in another town or state – when someone gets pulled over for speeding or a blown taillight – will often result in an arrest.

“It happens every day, all the time,” Bussiere said. “A warrant is like an albatross hanging from their neck.”

The department will likely not work hard to track down someone who never paid a $50 violation for fishing without a license, he said.

Not all crimes are the same, though.

For instance, after a recent sweep aimed at catching 17 local drug-ring members netted only 16 people, Lewiston police and other agencies pulled out the stops.

The Central Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, based in Lewiston, spread its net.

On Wednesday, the last man targeted in the Jan. 18 sweep, Efstathios Mihalakis of Winthrop, was arrested in Florida.

The North Florida Violent Fugitive Task Force joined with the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Highway Patrol to capture the fugitive on Interstate 10 in Defuniak Springs.

Mihalakis is expected to be extradited back to Maine.

“There are ways of tracking people down,” Bussiere said. If police aim to catch someone, they will.

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