Many seek sex crime data
Oregon public wants offender data — and get it
By WILLIAM McCALL
Associated Press
Sunday, March 15, 2009 12:10 AM PDT
PORTLAND — Vi Beatty, manager of the Oregon State Police sex offender registry, says the registry’s Web site gets about 34,000 hits a day, and more when stories about offenders make the news, sometimes nearly doubling.
In addition, Beatty says, state police get more than 400 phone calls and e-mails each month asking whether people are on the list.
‘‘We get parents contacting us, saying our daughter is dating so and so, can you tell us whether he’s a sex offender?’’ Beatty said.
Public awareness about sex offenders and access to information about them has been expanding in Oregon since the first sex offender registration law was enacted in 1989.
The public has access to that data by contacting the state police, who have maintained the list of all registered sex offenders in Oregon since 1999.
In 2006, the state began posting a list of high-risk predatory sex offenders, a smaller group of about 5 percent of all the registered offenders, on an Internet site.
‘‘They wanted what they term the ‘worst of the worst’ out there for the public to see,’’ Beatty said.While advocates of open government have complained about legislators passing scores of exemptions over the years to Oregon’s open records law, the state has been making efforts to increase access to information about sex offenders.
The reasons have been heightened concerns about public safety, along with pressure from voters, influential lobbyists and the development of registries in other states, according to Kevin Neely, spokesman for the Oregon District Attorneys Association.
‘‘It’s been a cross-pollination of keen public interest and action by policy makers,’’ Neely said.
There is debate about the effectiveness of how sex offenders have been tracked. Law-enforcement officials and many crime victim advocates argue sex offender registries help improve public safety, although studies on recidivism have failed to show whether there is any deterrent effect.
‘‘It’s not just a gimmick,’’ said Kevin Mannix, a former state lawmaker and author of the Oregon mandatory sentencing law. ‘‘It’s a very useful tool.’’
Suzanne Brown-McBride, executive director of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, has a different take. She contends there is a risk that notification laws can be used to run an offender out of a neighborhood and potentially undermine public safety by making the offender more difficult to supervise or transient, increasing the chances of re-offending.
She also says registries can give the impression that the listed offenders are the only people who pose a threat.
Brown-McBride advocates notification systems that provide public access to trained professionals who can explain the level of risk posed by an individual offender.
‘‘Sadly, however, even though the public can benefit from accurate and thoughtfully considered information about sexual offenders, many mechanisms that states and local governments use to inform the public are incomplete, difficult to understand or may even be inaccurate,’’ Brown-McBride said in an e-mail.
Oregon makes an effort to explain those risk levels. Pat Schreiner, district manager for the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice, says the county’s parole and probation officers who deal with sex offenders receive extensive training on assessing risk.
‘‘We’re one of only three states in the country to train parole officers to use clinical techniques,’’ Schreiner said.
‘‘If I’m just trusting my gut on assessment, I’m going to be wrong half the time, so these are validated, actuarial risk assessment processes,’’ he said.
Joan Copperwheat, the Lane County parole and probation manager, says that anybody under post-prison supervision is classified with risk assessment tools, but there are multiple assessment tools for sex offenders in Oregon.
Still, she agrees with Brown-McBride that the public should not focus on the registry as the highest risk, especially when it comes to protecting children.
‘‘Most of the sex offenders are people you know, not scary guys who jump out from behind trees,’’ Copperwheat said.
The main goal of the Oregon registry and similar registries in other states, officials say, is to track sex offenders after they get out of prison and to reduce the risk that they will commit a similar crime.
‘‘What the registry laws are intended to do is make sure that people who have a criminal history of committing sex offenses are where they’re supposed to be,’’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
‘‘The primary purpose is to provide meaningful monitoring and oversight to minimize the risk of reoffending,’’ Allen said.
Nationally, the center estimates about 100,000 convicted sex offenders among the 674,000 required to register are noncompliant — about 15 percent who have not registered or provided their address.
In Oregon, more than 15,000 sex offenders were registered by the end of 2008, with about 16 percent noncompliant.
By that measure, Oregon is about average and can improve, officials say.
‘‘I’d say it’s an effective tool, but we can hone it and do even better than we’re doing,’’ said Steve Doell, president of Crime Victims United of Oregon.
Some cities are doing better than others. In Albany, for example, there are 336 registered offenders and 28 are out of compliance, or just over 8 percent.
‘‘We have two detectives tasked specifically to sex abuse cases,’’ said Capt. Eric Carter of the Albany police.
In Medford, police officer Tom Sweeney is in charge of checking up on the roughly 425 registered sex offenders in his city. Last year he managed to contact about 250 offenders and discovered 45 were out of compliance.
Still, he says that’s an improvement over 2003, when he took over the Medford program.
‘‘When we started out, we had a whole lot of out-of-compliance offenders,’’ Sweeney said.
Even with the registry, offenders sometimes slip through the cracks.
Doell cited the case of a girl who was killed recently by a convicted sex offender in Vancouver, Wash., while he was wearing a GPS tracking device that detailed his every move.
In Roseburg, a registered sex offender was arrested last July and charged with attempting to abduct a 7-year-old girl by trying to pull her into his sport utility vehicle after driving up alongside her while she was riding her bike.
Police or parole officers may warn the public about sex offenders classified as ‘‘predatory’’ at neighborhood meetings, or with the distribution of fliers, newspaper ads or by posting notices on offender residences. The offender’s address, a physical description, photographs and type of vehicle driven can also be released.
Although community notification is allowed for predatory offenders, they are outnumbered about 20 to 1 in Oregon by sex offenders convicted of lesser felonies.
Less information is available about them under privacy laws, and the public must call or e-mail the Oregon State Police to see if they are registered.
Requests can be made to a local or county law enforcement agency, or a community corrections office, to find out more details or an address — if the agency can release it.
‘‘If somebody calls in to the registry and asks, ’What you can tell me about so and so?’ — under Oregon law, we can release information needed to keep the public safe,’’ Beatty said.
The privacy of sex offenders is protected to some extent, but courts have consistently ruled they must register because it is a regulatory law and not considered additional punishment tacked on to a prison sentence.
‘‘The registration scheme itself has been upheld against virtually every challenge, including juveniles,’’ said Dave Fidanque, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Oregon.
Challenges in Oregon have centered on whether convicted offenders are properly classified as predatory, Fidanque said.
Doell said he would like to see counties give sex offenders a higher priority with the $230 million budgeted for parole and probation supervision statewide.
Allen, of the national children’s center, said he is pushing for more federal funding with a July deadline approaching for states to adopt guidelines leading to a national registry under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.
‘‘There’s a clear willingness to provide some of these funds,’’ Allen said.
Roy Cooper, the attorney general for North Carolina, said a national registry would help keep sex offenders off social networking Web sites, such as MySpace, which announced in February it had removed about 90,000 sex offenders after Cooper investigated.
‘‘I can see immediate benefits from a nationwide database of sex offenders,’’ Cooper said. ‘‘It can help us immediately on social networking sites. And it would help in sharing sex offender information with other states, particularly sex offenders who move from state to state.’’
