The Vigilantes

[FOUR]

It was no secret to the one and a half million residents of the sixth-most-populated city in America that the City of Brotherly Love was among the deadliest in America.

Philadelphia-“Killadelphia,” Payne heard it called at least once every damn day-averaged a murder daily-down from, incredibly, a two-a-day average only a decade ago-which of course kept the police department’s Homicide Unit plenty busy.

What politicians wished was more of a secret, if only because of bureaucratic bungling and intergovernmental finger-pointing, was the fact that there were tens of thousands of fugitives loose on the streets. Nearly fifty thousand miscreants-from pimps to pedophiles to robbers to rapists to junkies to every other lawless sonofabitch-who had skipped out on their bail and were on the run from facing their day in court.

As a general rule of thumb, the main purpose of a court’s bail system was more or less a noble one: to let certain of those charged with crimes to remain productive family members and citizens in their community until their court date, which could be months away. This “pretrial release” reinforced the presumption that those charged with crimes were “innocent until proven guilty.”

It also, conveniently, helped ease the burden on the overcrowded jails. And that, in turn, eased the financial burden on a cash-strapped city to provide three square meals a day, armed guards for supervision, and sundry other services.

The vast majority of America’s biggest cities used the bail bond system, a private-sector enterprise administered by for-profit companies. In contrast, the City of Philadelphia (and the City of Chicago, Illinois, which had a similar number of fugitives from justice) used a system of deposit bail, which was government-funded and government-run.

In Philly, it was overseen by judges from the Municipal Court and from the Court of Common Pleas.

Using a worksheet titled “Pretrial Release Guidelines,” an arraignment magistrate determined the severity of the crime and the risk factor of the person charged with the crime to set the bail. The guidelines would, in theory, set a bail high enough to ensure that the person charged with the crime would appear in court so as not to lose the security fee.

Once the bail fee had been set, both the bail bond and the deposit bond worked essentially the same way. Generally, depending on various factors, the person charged with the crime had to pay only ten percent of the whole security fee to get out of jail.

The main differences between the two models arose if the offender missed or skipped out on his court date. Under the bail bond model, the court went after the bail bondsman for the deadbeat’s forfeited fee-the company then had a financial incentive to find the deadbeat and deliver him to the court. There was no similar financial incentive, however, with a deposit bond. The government already owned the deadbeat’s IOU. It was funny money, more or less worthless unless they hunted down the deadbeat and collected the remaining fee-if they could find him, and if he had the funds to pay.

And so, not surprisingly, those who’d blown their deposit bail numbered around fifty thousand-no one knew the exact number because, due to more bureaucratic blundering, a master listing was never kept.

These fugitives collectively owed hundreds of millions of dollars for their unpaid IOUs.

Worse, in the meantime they remained at large on the streets, acting with impunity-effectively telling the City of Philadelphia and its judicial system to go fuck itself.

All kinds of craziness going on down there, Payne thought, while I’m up here enjoying the company of this incredible goddess.

And God knows I do love her.

But do I love being out there chasing some murderer more?

He sighed.

The answer-right here, right now-is not no, but hell no!

And Amanda’s not complaining that they pulled me back off the street and stuck me at a desk in Homicide. There’s absolutely no question that deep down, all things being equal, she’d rather I do something other than be a cop, anything that didn’t risk me getting shot in the line of duty, like her father, or killed, like my father and uncle.

And that obit damn sure spelled it out.