FL- Sex-offender laws burden neighborhood

Caused by politicians who allege they are protecting children. Hummm, what about the children in the "clustered area" are they being protected?

6-20-2009 Florida (Broward):

The surreal specter of people forced by the state to live under a bridge is only one of the unintended consequences of South Florida's overwrought sex-offender residency laws.

Graciela Ortiz struggles with another.

As city after city passed ordinances that essentially banished registered sex offenders, Broadview Park -- the unincorporated blue-collar subdivision where Ortiz has lived since she was 10 -- has become, by default, their last practical refuge in South Florida.

In January, Ortiz said, only a few registered sex offenders resided in the tired single-story duplexes and modest block homes near her apartment. Lately, Ortiz, mindful of a daughter and three grandchildren (10, 8 and 4) in the duplex next door, feels utterly overwhelmed.

Ninety-five registered offenders now live within five blocks. Nine reside along her block on Southwest 24th Street. Count the duplexes around the corner and the number jumps to 14. Local landlords, exploiting the Broadview loophole, have packed the desperate outcasts into apartments, two and three to a room.

Ortiz, 52, was warning neighbors Friday, door-to-door, that their mostly Hispanic blue-collar community has become a human dumping ground. She knows of no incident in which a sex offender has harmed a local kid. ''But I'm stressed all the time,'' she said. ``The kids can't play outside. I worry when they go to school.''

The unforeseen clustering of sex offenders in the last few slivers of unincorporated Broward has flummoxed the County Commission. Mindful of the Tuttle bridge mess in Miami, anxious to avoid both a homeless crisis and a constitutional challenge, Broward's commissioners appointed a task force to explore alternatives to another 2,500-foot no-live zone around schools, day-care centers and parks. The task force will meet twice next week to finalize recommendations, but a meeting Thursday, punctuated with testy exchanges, indicated that a consensus might be a tough reach.

''A cascade of local ordinances led to clustering in the unincorporated area. Now we have 100 sex offenders in one neighborhood, That's not a good thing. We're concerned about the safety of residents and their children,'' said task force chair Jill Levenson.

But Ortiz and her allies want a buffer that would preclude nearly all the sex offenders from unincorporated Broward. Levenson and others on the task force worry that casting offenders into homelessness and social instability would render them more difficult to monitor, more apt to abscond from supervision, more likely to re-offend. Until the very measures meant to protect children only ratchet up the risk.

But that's a tough concept to sell to an angry grandmother.

Three homeless sex offenders were living under the U.S. 441 bridge not far from Broadview Park on Friday -- a possible preview of things to come.

George Horne, a bridge dweller for seven months, said Broward sheriff's deputies threatened to arrest him if he didn't abandon the bridge, while his probation officer threatened to send him back to prison if he wasn't there every night by 10 o'clock.

''I don't know what I'm supposed to do,'' Horne said.

The county struggles with the same dilemma, writ large. ..Source.. by FRED GRIMM