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Bounty Hunters
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B
ounty hunters are people whose job is to go
after “skips.” Skips are people who either
escape from police custody or never show up
to their court dates. Sometimes skips are dangerous
criminals who
commit terrible crimes like murder or
rape, but most often skips are people who have
committed more minor crimes, things like having drugs
or failing to pay
child support for their children.
Sometimes, criminals who run away from the
police or don’t show up at court are helped to hide by
their friends and family, or they may flee to another country where the laws are
different from the laws of their native country. In these cases, the police may
offer a special reward, or bounty, for anyone who helps to capture the fugitives.
This is where the term, bounty hunter, comes from. Bounty hunters are not
official members of the law-enforcement community, but they have a special role
to play nonetheless. They are paid to go after and capture criminals that the
police are unable to find or are unable to capture. Sometimes the bounty, or
reward, is small, just a few thousand dollars. Other times, however, the reward
can be quite large, up to several million dollars. For example, in 2003, the
United States put a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty out for Osama Bin Laden.
If a bounty hunter were to find and capture Osama Bin Laden, he or she would
become a very rich person.
Bounty hunters
operate outside of jurisdictions, or boundaries, which
means that they can go anywhere to catch a criminal while most police cannot.
For example, a police officer in New York cannot go to California to follow a
