I’m in NYC. If 170 people were arrested all at once it would cause a massive backlog. And I assume our court system is much larger than Waco’s.
Police in the city of New York arrest 140 people per day for marijuana possession.
Arresting 170 people at once would barely cause a hitch in their system.
However, even if the “poor little town” of Waco can only handle preliminary hearings for 8 people a day (that’s two judges at two hours per hearing per day), they should still have been able to process almost everyone who was arrested that day, and either bring specific charges, lower their bonds, or release them without charges, by now.
I live in a County with a population of 27,000 people and we have three judges available to hear cases in our Courthouse.
Ahh. That explains a lot.