For the past three years, members of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department have being going undercover at various fairs, parades, and festivals to protect local families and their children from the potential threat of sex offenders.
“We wander around in plain clothes and make sure the kids are safe,” said Sgt. Gregg Weitzman, a supervisor of the sheriff’s sex offenders tracking unit.
“I remember one time running into a guy using his laptop at an event and it turned out he had child porn on his laptop,” he said. “He’s still in jail.”
To monitor potential and convicted offenders, the county uses a Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) grant from the governor’s office. While the size of the grant has decreased recently due to the state budget crisis, Weitzman said it still allows his department to track sex offenders more proactively than ever before.
“It’s really allowed us to improve the safety of the community and keep these guys accountable,” he said. “It’s really important the public knows we take this very seriously.”
Sheriff’s and police departments are in charge of tracking sex offenders, who are required to report to officers within five days of sentencing, moving, and their birthday for the rest of their lives after conviction.
Still, there are quite a few road blocks preventing the Sheriff’s Department and other law enforcement agencies across the state from monitoring sex offenders efficiently. And two of the biggest culprits are the anti-offender bills themselves: Megan’s Law and Jessica’s Law.
In nearly every way possible, the laws enacted to protect and inform the community about sex offenders have amounted to far less than their sponsors said they would. The laws haven’t only failed to keep the public up to date about where sex offenders are, but have also given the
public the impression offenders can’t live near schools
and parks.
Anyone with a computer can go online, look at the California Attorney General’s sex offender website, and, in theory, see where many local sex offenders are living. The site was created after the passage of Megan’s Law in 2004, named after 7-year-old Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl raped and killed by a child molester who lived across the street from the family without their knowledge.
According to law enforcement sources, many sex offenders are listed as transients—homeless offenders who say they don’t sleep at any specific address. Their whereabouts are never revealed to the public.
“We’ve even found people whose registered addresses are in vacant fields or business locations,” Weitzman said.
Also, by law, many sex offenders don’t get on the Megan’s Law website: Spousal rapists, certain sexual batterers, and those convicted of underage consensual sex or indecent exposure aren’t listed. Some kinds of incest offenders can also avoid appearing on the site.
Sex offenders can live close to parks and schools because Jessica’s Law (Proposition 83) wasn’t retroactive; it only applies to parolees released after the law took effect on Nov. 6, 2006. Sex offenders convicted before this date can live anywhere they want.
The number of sex offenders declaring themselves transients has jumped since the passing of Jessica’s Law, said Gerry Blasingame, vice chair of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending and member of the California Sex Offender Management Board. The board was set up by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to oversee the state’s sex offender policy.
Sex offenders realized they could avoid residency restrictions under Jessica’s Law if they declared themselves transients. Instead of making sex offenders more accountable and easier for the public to track, the legislation provided a loophole that made them harder to find.
Blasingame said he believes many current sex offender laws are ineffective in protecting the populace.
“Jessica’s Law oversold what could be done to protect the public,” Blasingame said.
Most sex crimes toward children are committed by people the victim knows, not strangers, Blasingame explained. He said many laws on the books today don’t protect people as much as make them feel like something is being done.
“Anything that scares the public or gives a false sense of security is a vote getter,” Blasingame said. “What we need is improved public safety.”
Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department’s Weitzman agreed, adding that the bill “isn’t enforceable because [the lawmakers] forgot to write an enforcement section. They also forgot to say who would pay for the GPS tracking devices.”
The law is currently being reworked at that state level. State Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher (R-San Diego) also recently introduced A.B. 1844 in honor of the San Diego teen Chelsea King who was raped and murdered earlier this year.
Chelsea’s Law will increase penalties for sex crimes against children, lengthen the time sex offenders remain on parole with GPS monitoring, and establish “safe zones” to limit where these offenders can spend their time.
While the law is arguably an important one to have on the books, Weitzman said King’s death could have been prevented by a simple compliance check at the residence of accused murderer John Albert Gardner. Authorities have said Gardner wasn’t living at his registered address, but his mother’s Northern San Diego County home at the time of King’s murder.
“Someone could have fixed that because it’s an arrestable offense to use an address you’re not living at,” Weitzman said.
Robert A. McDonald, a staff writer at the Sun’s sister paper New Times, contributed to this article. Contact News Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 22-29, 2010.
