By Matt Drange
The Times-Standard
EUREKA, Calif. — Troy Garey remembers all 152 registered sex offenders he arrested from 2007 to his retirement earlier this year.
A former detective with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Garey said many of the offenders were arrested for failing to register. Sex offenders must register with local law enforcement once a year within five working days of their birthday, while those classified as violent must register once every 90 days and offenders who are transient every 30 days.
“I’m not here to make it harder on these people,” Garey said before he retired last July. “But if I ever start feeling sorry for some of these people, I just take a look at a picture of my wife or grandkids, and that renews my faith in what I do.”
Once a year Garey worked with local law enforcement to conduct a sweep of the county for sex offenders. In June 2010, the sweep resulted in 13 arrests, and involved some 20 officers.
Since then at least 23 sex offenders have been arrested in Humboldt County for failing to register, according to daily arrest logs from the sheriff’s office.
But while tracking sex offenders is nothing new, some feel that Jessica’s Law -- named after a Florida girl who was raped and murdered by a previously convicted sex offender -- is only making the job more difficult, specifically for tracking sex offenders registered as transient.
Robert Coombs is the director of the California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB), an independent advisory panel looking to amend the law, which California voters passed in 2006. Under Jessica’s Law, sex offenders are required to return to the county where they were convicted, and are not allowed to live within 2,000 feet of a school, park or playground.
Coombs said that in some areas this has led to an increase in homeless sex offenders, which he said makes it more likely for a person to re-offend.
“Stability is the most important thing for an offender once they are released,” said Coombs, adding that offenders are most likely to re-offend within the first year of their release, and that after that the risk goes down sharply. “It’s this perfect storm where you have people who are released and don’t have the tools to keep from offending, and are in a place where it’s easy to offend and it’s hard to get caught.”
Coombs uses an array of criteria to judge the risk that sex offender will offend a second time, including static risk, which could be something like age, and dynamic risk, which could be something like an alcoholic who starts drinking again, and can change in an instant.
“The premise of Jessica’s Law is that if you keep sex offenders out of certain areas that they will not offend,” said Coombs, who also works as a victim advocate. “Where a sex offender lives has virtually nothing to do with where they offend.”
Instead of resident restrictions, Coombs said that the state should adopt loitering laws that create exclusion zones for offenders, focusing not on where they live but where they are.
“When we make their [sex offenders] lives harder we end up with more victims,” Coombs said. “This isn’t about revenge; it’s about making sure that they commit less offenses.”
Of an estimated 92,000 sex offenders across the state, law enforcement is only responsible for about 10,000, or a little more than 11 percent.
But Eureka Parole Office Unit Supervisor Pervis Alexander said Jessica’s hasn’t had a major effect on his office, which uses two agents to track sex offenders in both Humboldt and Del Norte counties. While the number varies, Alexander said that there are roughly 55 sex offenders on active parole, about 10 percent of which are transients.
“We make it work,” Alexander said, adding he doesn’t worry about changes to the legislation. “We don’t make those kinds of decisions, we just enforce them.”
Alexander said that tracking sex offenders is a fluid job, and that it is important to adapt to changes in legislation such as Jessica’s Law. He credited GPS units -- which are attached to every sex offender’s ankle while they are on parole, generally a period of three to five years -- with playing a key role in keeping tabs on sex offenders, especially transients.
“It’s a very valuable tool for tracking these guys,” Alexander said, adding that his office always has plans for ongoing investigations, like the 18th annual Operation Boo on Halloween, which netted four registered sex offenders. “Like anything, we deal with what resources we have.”
But the GPS units come at a cost, said Coombs, who said that by spending money on GPS units parole offices are left with less agents in the field.
Compounding the issue further is the fact not all registered sex offenders are listed on the Megan’s Law website, which is run by the Department of Justice and lists sex offenders registered in California. Coombs said the criteria that decides who is listed varies greatly, as someone could be convicted of indecent exposure, for example, but be left off the public website.
In Humboldt County there are more than 400 registered sex offenders, but only 317 were listed on Megan’s Law on Thursday. Coombs said that the distinction was key to helping the public understand the issues behind sex offenders, and that California needs to revamp the way it tracks offenders in the future.
“If we’re paying parole agents to sit in front of computer screens, that’s a real loss in terms of public safety,” Coombs said. “If everyone thinks that sex offenders don’t live near them because they checked the Megan’s Law site, they are walking blind to the fact that these people are out there.”
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