FL- Busting camp offenders is not the answer

6-4-2009 Florida:

P icnic Island #4 is about as much a park as Marc Sarnoff is a statesman.

Picnic #4 rises out of Biscayne Bay as an obscure clump of a spoil island, accessible only by boat. (Or perhaps by amphibious sex offenders willing to swim 1,200 feet across open water from the Julie Tuttle Causeway.)

But the city of Miami, in a June 1 letter to Gov. Charlie Crist, cited the proximity of Picnic #4 as reason enough to roust the colony of sex offenders consigned to the causeway by the Florida Department of Corrections.

The letter, signed by the city manager but largely dictated by City Commissioner Sarnoff, claimed the 70 or so sex offenders living in the bowels of the causeway were ''subject to arrest'' for violating the city residency restrictions keeping them 2,500 feet from parks, schools and other places were children congregate. As if kiddies were congregating on Picnic #4.

DISGRACEFUL SITUATION

Sarnoff and City Manager Pete Hernandez rightly described the makeshift encampment as an unsanitary, festering mess. Except Sarnoff seems to think the solution is to make a disgraceful situation even worse.

To give him credit, however, he has managed an extraordinary feat, creating unlikely allies out of the ACLU and the Florida Department of Corrections.

Sarnoff's flawed reasoning began when he addressed the letter to a governor who would sooner give up his private plane than take on a politically risky problem like homeless sex offenders. For months now, Crist has been ignoring pleas from South Florida politicians to find a statewide alternative to these crazy local laws.

And Sarnoff and Hernandez surely know that Miami, of all places, can't go around busting homeless folk. The city was thoroughly whacked in U.S. District Court 13 years ago for regularly rounding up street people like dog catchers going after strays.

To resolve the embarrassing lawsuit, the city signed a consent decree pledging that Miami policemen would refrain from chasing homeless squatters off public property unless they were relocated to a proper shelter.

But Miami's homeless shelters -- and essentially all of South Florida's affordable housing -- fall within forbidden zones. Homeless shelters can't take in the Tuttle Causeway castaways.

Valerie Jonas, who worked on the original homeless lawsuit, made it clear Wednesday that the ACLU would charge back into federal court if the city cops violate the 1996 decree out on the Tuttle.

Besides, sex offenders stuck under the causeway aren't there by chance. DOC parole officers, unable to find suitable housing, told them that the middle of Biscayne Bay would be their only legal address in Miami-Dade County. They're loitering on state property because the state put them there. Which would make the city's next venture in federal court even more tenuous.

INSANE LAWS

A homeless camp in the middle of the bay, of course, is a mad, awful predicament. But the solution is to enact saner laws, replacing the over-reaching, insane hodgepodge of city and county residency restrictions that leave sex offenders with no place to live.

But rather than reform the residency ordinances that made them homeless, Sarnoff wants sex offenders busted for being homeless. It's no more a solution than Picnic #4 is a park. ..Source.. by FRED GRIMM