10-23-2009 Florida:
Levels of sex offender threat not all the same
For 45 minutes Thursday, Sgt. Chuck Mulligan stayed on the phone, talking to a worried woman.
There was a sexual predator living nearby, she told the St. Johns County lawman. She wanted to make him move.
"You can't make him move. He's served his time; he's a free man," Mulligan said later. But it was hardly the first time this week he'd heard someone rail about sex offenders.
The disappearance and slaying of 7-year-old Somer Thompson in Orange Park has triggered talk across Northeast Florida about protecting children, and how to balance that goal with the reality that thousands of our neighbors have been convicted of sex crimes.
"We see children who are harmed, and folks have a special feeling in their soul for children," Mulligan said. "It sets forth a passion to protect them. ...We can't let that passion get overzealous."
Authorities haven't said Somer was molested. But before her body was found Wednesday, investigators interviewed 57 sex offenders or predators who lived within 3 miles of the first-grader's home.
The simple fact that dozens of offenders lived there stunned many residents, but it really shouldn't have.
The 51,560 sex offenders registered in Florida rank it third in the country for known sex criminals, said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an information clearinghouse.
But from law enforcement to colleges, people who deal with sex offenders warn not to treat those lists as a complete inventory of the dangers facing children.
"All sex offenders are not alike. And all sex offenders do not represent the same level of risk or threat, particularly to children," said Ernie Allen, whose office sent staff to Orange Park after Somer vanished.
While he's glad there are lists and Web sites that parents can check to find sex offenders living nearby, Allen said parents need to know much more to keep their children safe.
"The problem is not so much where the offender lives as where the offender goes," he said. "Could they be volunteering at your youth organization? Could they be coming into your community, driving a bus or a truck?"
For that matter, many people on those lists committed crimes involving adults and wouldn't want to molest or injure a child, he said.
Most child molestation cases involve attackers with no prior arrest record, said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
"You can't tell much from the number of sex offenders in a particular neighborhood, in terms of relative risk," Finkelhor said.
"Most of the threat really comes from people who aren't on the list and can't be identified in terms of their locale."
The number of registered sex offenders varies greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood, a Times-Union check of the areas surrounding 12 Northeast Florida elementary schools found.
An upscale Ponte Vedra Beach neighborhood, for example, had just one offender listed in a 3-mile radius. There were more than 400 in the same area around a school in Jacksonville's Riverside neighborhood, but that includes about 100 in the Duval jail.
Some of that is just the economics of being a convict. People with criminal records generally earn less and need housing they can afford, Finkelhor said.
At the same time, the stigma attached to sex crimes makes living in a close-knit neighborhood less appealing. That's especially true for those whom state laws designate as sexual predators, because by law notices about their past are sent to their neighbors.
Some offenders who have to attend specialized counseling can end up congregating in areas close to that treatment, said Tony H. Grubesic, a geographer at Indiana University who researches where offenders live.
Local laws in Florida complicate finding a home, said Grubesic, who has counted nearly 130 rules about where in the state offenders can live.
About half of the 200 people in one mobile home park in Pinellas County are sex offenders, who go there because they can afford it and they're allowed there, he wrote in e-mailed comments.
Some offenders wouldn't fit most people's stereotypes. Mulligan said one man on the St. Johns roll was convicted at age 18 of having sex with a 17-year-old girl. Now in his 40s, the man is married to that woman but must still report his address to the authorities at regular intervals.
The challenge is to recognize which offenders are still dangerous to the public and to spot threats that aren't on the list, Finkelhor said.
"There are some individuals who have a high likelihood to reoffend and they're dangerous," he said. But keeping lists and setting restrictions on where people live isn't a cure-all to make neighborhoods safe.
"They create a false sense of security," he said. "They make people think they're clearing out the sex offenders from their midst. They're not really doing that. There are lot of sex offenders that are just not identified." ..Source.. by # Steve Patterson
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