I was told in riverside county, the police will only take you to jail for a felony warrant because of the overcrowded jail. is this true? For reasons I will not say here, I can't take care of the warrant until next year
There's simply no way to predict what the police will do. It is generally true that typical misdemeanor warrants are not actively pursued in Riverside County. However, I have seen several instances where a misdemeanor warrant is served as aggressively as any felony warrant. The major factors tend to be: 1) the type of crime, 2) the defendant, and 3) the interested agency.
If you are contacted randomly by a police officer who learns of the warrant (say, at a traffic stop), the decision to arrest you and require bail or cite release you with a date to appear will be made by the officer. In my experience, you have a better chance of being cited out if you are randomly contacted in the county that issued the warrant. So a Riverside police officer may well cite you out on a Riverside warrant, but take you in for a San Bernardino warrant.
Please note that all of this is (at best) informed guesswork. I understand that there are often reasons to leave a warrant outstanding, and some of those reasons are actually rational. However, once a case is filed and you are made aware of it, you are usually best served by addressing it in a timely manner.
At the very least, please contact an attorney directly to discuss the situation. If you are delaying with the intent to pursue a motion to dismiss for delayed prosecution ("Serna motion"), make sure that you are getting knowledgable input before you just leave a matter out to warrant for the next several months.
If that's what you were told, and you trust the source, it's probably fairly accurate.
Do they have the legal right to do so? Of course, In Fresno County some years back law enforcement agencies would get together for a multi-agency task force to round up people on misdemeanor warrants, probation and parole violations, etc.
Don't think you're 100 percent safe, though. You could easily get arrested on that warrant if you're a passenger in a car whose driver is stopped for a traffic violation on a Saturday night around midnight. Police pull the driver out and start administering field sobriety tests. The other officer asks to see your ID, runs you and -boom- up pops your warrant. So, until after the new year you should be extra careful about the company you keep and the situations you put yourself in.
