This reporter has done an excellent job of presenting the truth -in statistics- as to the concentrations of former offenders, in the areas around where Garrido lives. Hats off on this one...
9-4-2009 California:
t's a juicy nugget for the worldwide press, tripping alarms on the cable news fear-o-meter.
Anderson Cooper of CNN has the graphics to prove it and a roster of experts to explain how the local area where police say Jaycee Dugard was held in sexual bondage for 18 years has fast become a dense haven for registered sex offenders.
"How Jessica's Law turned Antioch into a paedophile ghetto," splashed a headline Thursday on the Web site of The Independent, a major British newspaper.
Disturbing, if true. Only it's not, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of sex offender addresses and census data.
News that more than 100 registered sex offenders call Antioch home has sparked a TV news frightfest and stirred worry in local residents. But while the number of registered sex offenders per capita in the city places it above the Bay Area rate of slightly less than one per 1,000 people, Antioch falls well below dozens of other Bay Area communities, and barely cracks the top 10 in Contra Costa County.
Antioch police Chief Jim Hyde took pains to note that the Garrido home sits outside city limits in unincorporated Contra Costa County, which is patrolled by the county sheriff's office. But the city is taking flak from the case, he said, and from what he called "high school journalism" on sex offenders.
"They're mad because they feel their town has been defamed," said Hyde of local residents. Hyde said he has fielded angry calls and e-mails from as far as Germany and England, taking the city to task.
To be sure, the large majority of the 122 registered sex offenders who list the city as their home on the state's Megan's Law online database dwell in the 94509 ZIP code, which encompasses the older housing north of Highway 4. The ZIP code includes the home of Jaycee's accused abductors, Phillip and Nancy Garrido, in unincorporated Antioch, and two other sex offenders who live within a few blocks.
How many people live in the 94509 is not accurately known, because it split into two ZIP codes in 2001, after the last census. But postal service and city estimates suggest that perhaps two-thirds of the city's 102,000 residents live there. If so, the 101 registered sex offenders who call the ZIP code home would rank it 39th in the Bay Area and 15th in the East Bay in sex offenders per capita in ZIP codes with more than 1,000 people.
ZIP codes in Oakland, Richmond, Emeryville, Hayward, San Jose, Gilroy, Vallejo, San Francisco, Redwood City and several other Bay Area ZIP codes exceed it.
The Times analysis also casts doubt on a thicket of speculation that Jessica's Law has fueled a significant migration of Bay Area sex offenders to Antioch's foreclosure-driven stock of cheaper rental housing that sits more than 2,000 feet from a school or park.
The 2006 ballot measure set tough restrictions on where new sex offenders can live the rest of their lives. With little available housing in the urban Bay Area, the thought goes, more outlying cities such as Antioch are seeing a wave of new, undesirable residents in places far from schools and parks.
And they surely will, say experts, as more sex offenders leave prisons and find fewer and fewer housing options in urban areas. But the restrictions in California don't apply retroactively, meaning registered sex offenders like Garrido, who has remained out of jail since 1993, can stay where they live.
Since early last December, the number of registered sex offenders added to the Megan's Law online database in the 94509 ZIP code has risen by five, from 96 to 101. Maps produced by the state Senate in 2006 show that schools and parks in the city make most of it off-limits to sex offenders who fall under the new law, with patches of legal areas by the freeway and along the Delta.
The Megan's Law database has grown by about three percent since December, to more than 65,000 names of those living in California communities. For law enforcement, the numbers are overwhelming, said Contra Costa County sheriff's Capt. Daniel Terry. He said about 1,700 registered sex offenders now live in the county — up nearly 50 percent in a decade. About 350 live in unincorporated pockets countywide.
"That's 349 more than detectives I have to monitor these people," said Terry. "That alone in itself is a huge task. And as dangerous as these people are, for every one of them that's been through the criminal justice system, there's a handful that are just as dangerous and haven't been caught yet. We're inundated with sexual assault cases."
A task force including the sheriff's office and local police visited Garrido's house during a July, 2008 sweep to check on compliance — that he lived where he said he did, said Terry. They entered the house and walked through, noticed nothing unusual and left.
"There was no evidence to support any type of foul pay or elicit activity that would violate his position as a (Megan's Law) registrant," he said. "Did we go into his backyard and climb the 8-foot wall into the compound that for 17 years nobody knew he was using? No, we did not."
Sheriff Warren Rupf last week apologized, however, for a deputy's weak response to a 911 call in 2006, from a neighbor reporting suspicious circumstances involving young children in the backyard. Sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee refused to provide a recording or transcript of the emergency call.
The state Attorney General's Office declined to give the Times an updated copy of its Megan's Law database this week. For the analysis, the Times compared current population and sex offender figures for Antioch's two ZIP codes with per-capita rates based on a Dec. 2, 2008 copy of the Megan's Law database and census population data. A bit more than half of registered sex offenders in the database — about 39,000 — list ZIP codes.
One Antioch councilman noted that the situation in the city was more alarming a few years ago, when state parole officials responded to stricter rules for housing sex offenders by putting them up in local motels. State officials said this spring they were suspending a housing program that cost as much as $22 million a year to house paroled sex offenders and keep them from becoming homeless.
"It's not as big a deal as it was when the state was using some motels as staging grounds for folks," said councilman Brian Kalinowski. The increase of registered sex offenders in the city by 10 over the past eight months "isn't a trend I'd be worried about in the short-term, but it's something we'd want to watch and monitor," he said.
"Ninety nine percent of them fly under the radar, paroled into the community, and a very large percentage of them don't have issues," Kalinowski said. "From my perspective, one individual who's sick in the head doesn't define a community." ..Source.. by John Simerman, Contra Costa Times
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