Bounty Hunters, Bail Bonds, Van Nuys, and You

Bounty hunters — from Dog to Boba Fett, the title of bounty hunter seems to evoke a sense of power, invulnerability, and immunity to consequence. The reality of the job is very different from the romanticized version you see on TV and in the movies. In real life Los Angeles, a bounty hunter is simply a person who is hired by a Los Angeles bail bondsman to bring in a defendant that has jumped bail.

A bail bondsman, in turn, is someone who has contracted with the court to put up the full amount of someone’s bail in exchange for 10% of the total bail amount. If the defendant goes to all of his court dates, the bail bondsman gets his money back, and gets to keep the 10% (which he receives from the defendant’s family in exchange for putting up the whole bail amount).

If the defendant doesn’t show up for court, the bondsman is out 90% of the bail amount — unless he can hire a bounty hunter to get the defendant back within a relatively short timeframe. In order to make sure that the bounty hunter can accomplish this goal, the government allows bounty hunters a variety of rights that normal citizens don’t have, including the right to shoot people and break into people’s houses in pursuit of a bail jumper.

In the vast majority of cases, a bail jumper is simply hiding out somewhere, scared and passive. The bounty hunter’s real-life job, then, is 90% private detective and only 10% gun-toting badass. Most of their effort goes to finding people that are hiding; very little time is spent kicking down doors and waving large-caliber weapons in people’s faces. The best bounty hunters claim a 90% retrieval rate, and less than 1% of those cases involve any form of violence.

The bounty hunter collects a fee from the bail bondsman for every successfully returned defendant. That cuts into the bondsman’s profit, and it gives the bondsman strong incentive to make sure the defendant doesn’t jump bail in the first place.

They do this mostly by being careful about the people to whom they give out their bail bonds. Van Nuys bail bondsmen don’t hesitate to deny a bail bond to repeat offenders, families with poor credit history, or even families that have relatives across the border.