Starting to smell the residency restriction coffee
According to this USA Today article, some (but not all) state officiasl are starting to realize that common sense needs to temper broad laws seeking to banish all sex offenders from communities. Here are snippets from an article entited, “Sex-offender residency laws get second look,” which also has this accompanying table:
Oklahoma state Rep. Lucky Lamons was a police officer for 22 years. He calls himself a “lock-’em-up kind of guy.” Yet Lamons wants to loosen his state’s law that bans registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center. He says it forces many offenders to live in rural areas where they are difficult for authorities to monitor. Also, he says, it does not differentiate between real predators and the type of men he recalls arresting for urinating in public, a sex offense in Oklahoma. “We need to focus on people we’re afraid of, not mad at,” says Lamons, a Tulsa Democrat who wants the rules to focus more on high-risk offenders.
Lamons is among a growing number of officials who want to ease the “not-in-my-backyard” policies that communities are using to try to control sex offenders. In the past decade, 27 states and hundreds of cities have reacted to public fear of sex crimes against children by passing residency restrictions that, in some cases, have the effect of barring sex offenders from large parts of cities. They can’t live in most of downtown Tulsa, Atlanta or Des Moines, for example, because of overlapping exclusion zones around schools and day care centers. Now a backlash is brewing.
Several states, including Iowa, Oklahoma and Georgia, are considering changes in residency laws that have led some sex offenders to go underground. Such offenders either have not registered with local police as the laws require or they have given fake addresses. Many complain they cannot find a place to live legally. The push to ease residency restrictions has support from victims’ advocates, prosecutors and police who say they spend too much time investigating potential violations.
They’re battling a mountain of momentum, however, because residency restrictions remain popular. New or expanded ones have been proposed in 20 states this year. Some legislators are reluctant to pare back restrictions they passed only recently. “We ought to give it time to work,” says state Rep. Jerry Keen, author of Georgia’s law, passed last year, which bans sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of where kids gather. Keen, Republican majority leader of the House, says Georgia’s rules put children’s safety before the convenience of sex offenders.
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