Houston police officers have been ordered to not arrest anyone with outstanding traffic warrants because Houston jails are full.
 
"We have limitations placed on us by the state as to the number of people we can have," said Alan Bernstein with the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

Bernstein said the department's inmate processing center, which has a capacity of 269, was never built to take in the number of people that it takes in every night.

In order to not exceed that number, the county and city planned to limit the number of people that HPD can send to the county jail at any one time. They settled on a two-hour system in which the city would call the county to say how many could be sent.

From the moment the program started it was clear there were going to be issues, insiders said. At 3 a.m. Thursday HPD made its first call to the county jail to find out how many people it could transfer and that number was zero up until the next afternoon. 

The problem stems from the fact that on an average busy night HPD may arrest 400 people that have to go somewhere. The central jail near downtown holds 257 people,
the southeast jail holds 143, which is a total capacity of 400 for both locations.

But as of 5 a.m. there were just 32 spaces available at both jails combined,    and there were 127 people waiting to be transferred to the county jail. That's before any more arrests were made.
   
HPD Asst. Chief Vicki King said when the arrests overload the system "we'll stack them up like cord wood."

King said the only other possibility is to move people to holding cells at various police substations around the city.     But in those locations officers are legally limited to only being able to hold persons for a few hours, then they must be released.

City and county officials say they are still working on a better solution.  In the meantime, there is no end in sight to this issue and the officers' orders stand until further notice.