Sex offenders falling through cracks

The men who check in Tuesday and Thursday mornings with Lynda Cummings at the Marysville Police Department are not unlike sex offender registrants in other cities and towns across the United States.

Some of them have been convicted of and have done time for crimes that involved children; others, for offenses involving only adults. Some have offenses dating back several decades and have convictions for non-sex-related crimes as well.

But unlike registrant lists in surrounding jurisdictions, Cummings' list includes no parolee addresses.

Proposition 83, better known as Jessica's Law, forbids any registrant on parole or probation from living within 2,000 feet of a school, park or playground. And because Marysville is so densely concentrated, there is not a single foot of space within the city limits that is legal for registrant parolees to reside.

"If you're a sex offender on parole," Cummings spells out plainly, "you can register in Marysville, but you can't live in Marysville."

On the face of it, this distinction is good news for the town's residents, especially those who voted for Jessica's Law in 2006 because of its residency restrictions. It means, theoretically, that no one in Marysville has to live next door to, or even down the street from, a person recently released from jail or prison for a sexual offense.

But in reality, says Cummings — the Police Department's crime scene investigator, also tasked with sex offender registration — sex offenders are around us every day.

"They're at our Walmart, they're at our park, they're at our swimming pool," she says.

The law's expanded residency restriction simply makes people think they're not around. It also makes more of them homeless, and therefore tougher to track, Cummings says.

Before Jessica's Law went into effect in 2007, California had only 88 registered sex offenders who were homeless.

Now, according to the California Sex Offender Management Board, the number hovers between 2,200 and 2,300.

"If they're living in a house, at least we can keep an eye on them," Cummings says. "How hard do you think it is, though, to monitor the guy who lives under a bridge, or 500 feet south of the dump, or in a thicket by the river or whatever?"

A transient registered in Yuba County, who spoke with the Appeal-Democrat on condition of anonymity, said he thinks that fact alone makes communities less safe than before.

"The homeless lifestyle leads to depression, and that leads to more drug use and stealing to get food — and the crime levels are going to go up," says the 47-year-old, whose original offense involved fondling a teenage girl.

And the instability of living outdoors can trigger an offender's worst impulses.

"When you don't have a bed or roof — a place to shower, do your laundry, keep your laundry — your susceptibility to re-offend is there," he says.

Jack Wallace, coordinator for the California Sex Offender Management Board, says this fact, widely accepted by criminologists, creates yet another in a series of bad side effects of Jessica's Law.

"Research says sex offenders who don't have stable employment and stable housing re-offend more," he says.

Furthermore, the notion that keeping sex offenders from having an address near a park or school will cut down on sex crimes involving children, he claims, is false.

"Gardner murdered in a park," he says, referring to John Albert Gardner III, the registered sex offender convicted and sentenced to life in prison earlier this year for killing two teenage girls in San Diego County. "Nothing kept him out of that park in the daytime."

The worst predators, Wallace says, "are going to find people to assault regardless of where they live."

Cummings says that parents should be vigilant, as always.

"You can't be paranoid," she says, "but you have to be smart."

A false sense of security

Few law enforcement agencies in California have the resources to check routinely on housed registrants, says Wallace, whose panel advises the Legislature on sex offender supervision. In most jurisdictions, checking transients is nearly impossible.

"I'm basically yelling people's names out the window of a truck down in Thorntree," Cummings says of the trips she makes into a wildly overgrown area in the Feather River bottom on the northwestern fringe of the city.

But many who register as transient are not, in fact, sleeping out in the elements.

"Folks sleep in their car, if they have enough money to have a car," says Wallace. "And that car can be parked anywhere. Once someone is transient, you really don't know where they are."

In recent months, Cummings has worked to pin down a couple of these. One usually registers in Marysville, and another registers elsewhere but frequents a Marysville motocross track.

In the first case, a registered sex offender with a job as a truck driver is out of compliance with requirements that he register with law enforcement every 30 days.

"He registered 63 times as a transient," Cummings says. "All of the sudden, he disappears."

In the second case, a man who travels regularly throughout the region and approaches children at motocross tracks has proven to be very slippery for law enforcement, according to Cummings.

"This guy is bad, and nobody knows he's out there," she says.

Even Megan's Law, which receives some good reviews from law enforcement officials and users of the popular online databases, falls short in some ways, say Cummings and Wallace.

The original sex offense charge of one of Cummings targets did not meet requirements for inclusion in the database. Cummings has found a long string of restraining orders against him dating back to 1988.

And because Marysville's postal ZIP code extends south and east of the city limits, the Megan's Law site lists skewed numbers of registrants for that and many other jurisdictions.

The website, Cummings said, misleads in other ways too.

"Megan's Law includes most sex offenders — not just child molesters," she says. "I mean, there's registrants, and then there's predators. Not everyone on Megan's Law molested a child. People are confused by this."

Side effects

In any given month, Marysville's official list has 50 to 55 names.

There would be more, Cummings says, but Jessica's Law — which, because of ongoing court battles is far more limited in practice than originally intended — pushes sex offender registrants to other nearby communities.

Yuba County registers about 180 each month, and most registrants live in either Linda or Olivehurst, where things are a bit more spread out than in Marysville.

"The law puts a greater burden on certain jurisdictions like Yuba County," Cummings says of the side effects to Jessica's Law.

Yuba City registers just over 100, and doesn't create quite the same problem for Sutter County.

The same sprawl for which Yuba City is often criticized provides sufficient land for registered sex offenders to establish an address outside Jessica's Law's quarter-mile requirement.

Sutter County, therefore, does not get much in the way of resulting spillover, says Capt. David Samson of the Sutter County Sheriff's Department.

"We don't really have that many," he says. "I guess we're relatively lucky."

In a much bigger parallel universe, San Francisco's density of schools and parks has forced it — like Marysville — to push much of its sex offender population to its outskirts through Jessica's Law.

When Philip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were arrested and charged last year with abducting, imprisoning and sexually abusing Jaycee Lee Dugard over an 18-year period, the law came under fire from all sides, including the media.

"Tools such as GPS and parole supervision can fall tragically short when jurisdictions don't work together …" reads a Sept. 3 editorial from USA Today. "This tragic case (Dugard) highlights the need for systemic changes that will promote collaboration between agencies and the community at large."

Because the law's application targets only registrants on parole or probation, Garrido, whose previous crimes date back to the 1970s, was not subject to its restrictions.

Also, Antioch, the blue collar city where he lived and kept his alleged victim, fell under scrutiny when it was discovered that more than 100 convicted sex offenders live in Garrido's neighborhood.

In September, a newspaper in Britain published an article under the headline "How Jessica's Law turned Antioch into a pedophile ghetto."

The story argues that poor communities with limited resources for law enforcement have become magnets for sex offenders under the legislation.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported that an encampment of 30 to 40 homeless paroled sex-offenders was recently disbanded in Anaheim by Orange County parole officers.

Not everyone is as down as that on Jessica's Law, however.

Nancy Nelson, crime analyst for the Yuba City Police Department, is unhappy primarily with the way it has been implemented.

"Jessica's Law was supposed to be put in place for all registrants," she says. But, "if they're not on parole right now, we can't tell them where to live. We'd like to maintain tight control to protect our community, but it's difficult when the law has no teeth."

Still, she says, "We're safer now than we were before that, and Megan's Law."

What's next

The legislation that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2006 mandated lifetime monitoring by way of Global Positioning Satellite devices for California's 66,000 registered sex offenders. But financial realities allow law enforcement to track less than 10 percent with GPS.

State funding allows local jurisdictions the devices and monitoring systems only for parolees.

Reliance on GPS is unwise anyway, say critics of Jessica's Law.

"GPS can tell you where someone has been and where they are," George Hinkle, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the North County Times newspaper recently. "But it can't tell you what they're doing."

It also can't predict what a registrant will do in the future.

Gardner wore a GPS ankle bracelet until the end of his parole, shortly before he killed 17-year-old Chelsea King.

A resulting bill expected to go before the Assembly soon calls for mandatory life sentences for forcible violent sex crimes against children and would require lifelong GPS tracking for certain kinds of sex offenders.

Cummings says she'll gladly take all the help she can get.

"We're all trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to supervise these people," she says. "The fact is, they do get out of prison, and we've got to find a way to live with them."

HISTORY OF JESSICA'S LAW

• Jessica's Law was named for Jessica Lunsford of Homosassa, Fla., who was 9 years old at the time of her abduction in February 2005.

• A neighbor confessed to kidnapping, raping and burying her alive. Jessica later died. The neighbor, a registered sex offender named John Couey, was on probation at the time and had a criminal history that included sex offenses against children.

• Forty states have passed versions of Jessica's Law for sex offenders. Most include sentencing requirements and residency restrictions.

SEX OFFENDER NUMBERS

In the state:

• 66,000 registered sex offenders live in California communities

• 6,700 registered sex offenders are on state probation

• 10,000 sex offenders are on local probation

• 49,000 sex offenders are not being actively supervised or monitored

Source: California Sex Offender Management Board