The purpose of this research note is to describe the population of individuals arrested by BC Transit Police officers on outstanding warrants. This analysis is based on the 606 arrests for outstanding warrants made by BC Transit Police officers in 2011. Of these 606 arrests, 72% were as a result of officers simply
doing fare checks, while the others were primarily because of officers responding to crime and disorder issues on and around the BC SkyTrain system. Of note, the 606 individuals arrested were associated to 747 outstanding warrants. To put this into context, 80% of the arrests were associated a single outstanding
warrant, 16% were associated to two warrants, 3% were associated to three, and 1% were associated to arrestees who had four outstanding warrants. The data derived from an anonymized dataset extracted from the PRIME system and on an RCMP case-matched and anonymized CPIC criminal history search.
That search revealed that 60% of those arrested already had a criminal conviction for at least one offence at the time of their arrest on the outstanding warrant. This report focuses primarily on that 60% of arrestees, which resulted in 359 individuals.
