Under the bridge or at the corner, Florida lawmakers refuse to solve the issue. Their way of further punishing certain former offenders and getting away with it.3-15-2012 Florida:
After Melissa Nelson moved into her little apartment off Northeast 79th Street a year ago, she noticed a certain fashion accessory prevalent in her new neighborhood: “All these guys walking around with black ankle bracelets.”
It added an aura of creepiness to life along her street. They were bracelets of the GPS kind.
Some 83 convicted sex offenders, many wearing ankle monitors, live within a half-mile of the intersection of 10th Avenue and Northeast 79th Street, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement registry. Twenty-two are listed as living at that very intersection, but as “transient.” About a dozen of them show up every evening to spend the night in cars, on folding chairs or in tents.
“This has become terrible,” said Maria Salvana, who lives in a two-story apartment just behind the impromptu camp. “About 10 kids live in our building. And to have all these sex offenders living outside. It’s scary. Something has to be done.”
Rafel Lopez, who works just across 79th Street at Oscar’s Complete Auto Repair, talked about the sanitation problems with men living outdoors. Food wrappers, discarded plastic bottles and an orange shopping cart are strewn along the roadside. “They just go in that field,” he said, pointing, shaking his head with disgust. At night, he said, the atmosphere in the homeless camp grows unruly. Even criminal. “Things happen. The police are called. But it keeps happening.”
So yet another South Florida neighborhood (though never one of the wealthier precincts) suffers the consequences of the ill-considered, over-reaching ordinances that bar sex offenders from residences within 2,500 feet of schools. (That’s in Miami-Dade County. Restrictions in other cities and counties across the state are often even more Draconian.)
The ordinances create maps with so many overlapping no-go circles that the effect is to concentrate offenders into just a few permissible areas. Some 60 offenders are squeezed into the decrepit, low-rent trailer park off Northwest 27th Avenue. (The River Park trailer community, by the way, is teeming with children, albeit poor immigrant children.). Those who can’t find a place to live outside the prohibited areas, or can’t afford the rent in the few apartments available, get the “transient” designation and move onto the sidewalk on the western approach to the 79th Street Causeway.
These same laws brought Miami a brutal dose of international infamy in 2007 through 2009, when a homeless camp sprang up under the Julia Tuttle Causeway with close to 100 offenders, a travesty of sanitation on the way to Miami Beach, before it was finally fenced off.
None of this stuff does a thing to protect children. (The basic rationale keeps offenders, who can walk all over town during the day, away from schools at night, when they children have already gone home.) The laws were passed at the behest of super-lobbyist and political bag man Ron Book without bothering to consult with actual social scientists. Though it has become plainly apparent that these residency laws only created a new, unstable homeless population, no politician has the courage to offend the all-powerful Book and fix this mess. And no politician relishes the political risk of undoing an ordinance, no matter how ineffective, that sounds like it’s tough on sex offenders.
Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff suspects that the Florida Department of Corrections has been referring homeless sex offenders, fresh out of prison, to the sidewalk on 79th Street. And Sarnoff wants the city to sue. Now that would be an interesting lawsuit, the city suing the state over the unintended consequences of a local ordinance. Not unlike suing a waiter because the food you ordered makes you fat.
“I don’t understand why all these sex offenders end up in my neighborhood. Now I got to worry about something happening to my children,” said Maria Gonzalez, who lives in an apartment with her three kids just a few blocks from the impromptu camp off 79th Street. “And that’s no way for them to live either. Having to sleep outside and go pee in the field and live like a bunch of dogs.”
“None of this stupid crap seems fair to anyone.” ..Source.. by Fred Grimm
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