Welfare Reform Helps Police Track Felons

Federal welfare reform is giving police a new weapon for tracking down fugitives: permission to match names on arrest warrants with addresses on welfare rolls that until now have been kept private.

“It’s a real tool that law enforcement really needs,” said Cuyahoga County Sheriff Gerald McFaul. “All we asked for is cooperation and to give us the tools to work with so we can stop the fraud for taxpayers.”

When the welfare reform bill signed by President Clinton takes effect July 1, it will close a loophole that allowed convicts who jump bail before sentencing, or who violate parole or probation, to collect welfare benefits while hiding from the law.

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., began pushing for the provision in early 1994 after the Associated Press reported that federal privacy statutes did not permit law enforcement agents access to welfare rolls. At the same time, the government did not exclude fugitives from public assistance.

The new law allows officers to match names on warrants with welfare recipients, then get a person’s address.

And a fugitive who is collecting benefits can be cut off.

“If there is even one person receiving welfare benefits who shouldn’t be, and that person is a fugitive, then that’s one more person taking benefits away from someone who should be getting them and is law-abiding,” said Mike Hershey, Santorum’s legislative director.

That provision is expected to save slightly less than $1 billion nationally during the next seven years, he said. It applies to people receiving food stamps, federal housing benefits or Supplemental Security Income, which is for the disabled and elderly.

Santorum has estimated that more than 397,000 felons are fugitives nationwide. No firm figures are available, but he believes many of these fugitives are living on welfare.

In Cuyahoga County alone, there are 13,000 outstanding warrants. Nobody will know until the law takes effect how many of those are on the dole.

In 1993, McFaul’s deputies learned that at least 91 of the 330 fugitives they rounded up in a six-month sting were receiving welfare, averaging $300 a month each.