The Bermuda Police Service recently provided some clarity regarding the management and processing of people with outstanding warrants for traffic and parking matters. According to the police, there are almost 18,000 outstanding warrants. Yes, you heard correctly, 17,971 outstanding warrants representing more than $10 million in outstanding fines.

For further clarity, those who are the subject of criminal warrants will continue to be arrested and processed in accordance with the law. However, the BPS is offering people with outstanding traffic and parking warrants the opportunity to voluntarily attend Hamilton Police Station and respond to them.

I have questions. How far back do some of these warrants go? How did we get to almost 18,000? Were people properly notified? How many people actually know they have an outstanding warrant? And most importantly, how do we avoid getting into this situation again?

I also wonder whether there should be some sort of grace offered. Now, I understand that some people may have intentionally ignored tickets or fines, and at some point personal responsibility has to come into play. You receive a ticket, you’re responsible for dealing with it.

But I also believe there are probably people who genuinely forgot. Yes, that may sound irresponsible, but with the average Bermudian focused on making ends meet and dealing with everything else life throws at them, it’s possible that a parking or traffic ticket from some time ago simply slipped someone’s mind.

That doesn’t mean the fine should disappear, but maybe there’s an opportunity to encourage people to come forward without immediately feeling like they’re going to be punished even further for doing so. If the goal is to clear the backlog and collect what’s owed, perhaps some sort of limited grace period could help accomplish that.

But the bigger issue for me is how we got here in the first place. Almost 18,000 outstanding warrants worth more than $10 million doesn’t happen overnight. At some point we have to ask whether this is simply a case of people not taking responsibility or whether there’s something within the system that hasn’t been working as it should.

If we clear these warrants today without fixing whatever allowed the number to grow this large, what’s stopping us from having the same conversation a few years from now?