Atsalis aims to create narcotics registry

A drug trafficker's registry? Not that I support registries at all, but, the comments about a "Look-Back" provision interest me.

Why not look-back to cover previous drug traffickers? What makes a new case different from an older case with respect to public safety. Is there some form of CURE for earlier offenders? How would children be shielded from earlier offenders? These and many other questions tweak my mind..

Finally, how would the classification system work, based on what? The amount of drugs they were caught with? And how long would they have to register for? And, would there be any form of residency laws, or civil commitment, tied to drugs? Or am I jumping the gun, those to come later when politicians need votes?

4-24-2010 Massachusetts:

CAPE COD — State Rep. Demetrius Atsalis, D-Hyannis, sees the creation of a narcotics offender registry as a step toward great public safety.

He’s been traveling the state talking about the registry, similar to the state’s Sex Offender Registry created in 2001.

“What we’ve been doing most recently is reaching out to various agencies, most recently the District Attorney’s office, and asking them to make suggestions,” said Atsalis, who traveled to the Massachusetts Secondary Schools Administrators Association meeting in Franklin on March 29 to promote the bill.

Atsalis said the idea for the legislation came out of a conversation with Barnstable Police Sgt. Michael Clark.

“Myself and Mike Clark have been friends for a long time and he was playing the public safety end of it, which I agree with, and he brought his brother Pat [a high school principal] into it who added the school end of the issue and it took off from there,” Atsalis said.

“The Narcotics Offender Registry will allow us to disseminate information to the public and help keep the community safer. It would allow the public to know who is living in their neighborhood in order to keep their children safer,” said Michael Clark.

The program would be structured much like the existing Sex Offender Registry with violators classified as a Level 1 (least likely to re-offend), a Level 2 or a Level 3 (most likely to re-offend) classification.

Those classified as Level 3 offenders would have their picture on police department Web sites and in the police station and in other community areas such as the new community center, said Clark.

Level 2 offender information would be available at the public’s request while information on Level 1 offenders would be available for police information only.

“We’re not targeting people who use drugs. We’re targeting people who sell drugs,” said Clark.

A person charged with possession of a drug would not be required to register with the statewide database. Only those offenders who were charged with possession with intent to distribute, distribution or drug trafficking would be registered.

The narcotics registry would be different from the Sex Offender Registry in that it has no “look-back window,” according to Clark. That means that if the legislation were passed, no previous offenders would be included in the registry.

“Everyone would have a clean slate. Nobody who has committed a crime previous to this will be included,” explained Clark.

The Sex Offender Registry had a look-back window of 20 years.

Clark said the narcotics registry would allow the police to monitor drug dealers more closely and allow police to provide information to residents to protect their families.

“[Now] we virtually can tell them nothing. If we tell them if they had a history, we could be sued. The narcotics registry would allow us to disseminate this information and let families know to keep their kids away. It would also allow the bus companies to create bus routes and stops to avoid these houses,” said Clark.

Without the narcotics registry in place, Clark said sometimes even the police departments are left in the dark about who is living in town.

“The problem that we run into sometimes is we would make arrests on somebody for something like drunk driving or assault at a bar and we get the person back to the police department and find that this person has four or five convictions for distributing drugs.

“We all look at each other and say we have 120 officers, why didn’t anyone know this person lived in our town. They get released and they can go anywhere in the state. It would be nice to know where that person was residing,” said Clark.

The legislation is before the Judiciary Committee and Atsalis said he is working with stakeholders to improve the proposed bill before re-filing it.

“We’re going to re-file it come December or the beginning of the year and we could have a hearing as soon as April 2011, I would hope,” said Atsalis.

“Things really just don’t happen overnight. It’s a deliberate, slow process to ensure we do it right and that’s what we are working on now.” ..Source.. Jen Ouellette, THE REGISTER