The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office will stop registering sex offenders who reside inside municipalities, it announced to cities in October.
The Office cited Department of Public Safety regulations barring them from doing so unless some sort of agreement is made between the county and the city, meaning that it is up to each city’s police department to register sex offenders.
According to MCSO Lt. Brady Fitzgerald, these regulations were recently “discovered” by the Office, prompting a letter sent to cities sometime in September or October.
“With the number of registered sex offenders in Montgomery County increasing, with the growth of our county and the limited resources that are provided for the (MCSO) Sex Offender Compliance Unit, we are working along with the incorporated cities here in Montgomery County to train representatives within the areas to comply with state law,” Fitzgerald said in an email to the Courier. “Up until now, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office has been doing all task (sic) involving registration of convicted sex offenders and rules abiding to convicted sex offenders assigned to unincorporated areas and incorporated areas.”
Fitzgerald and other MCSO employees declined an over-the-phone interview.
The switch only requires training a representative in some cities, like in Stagecoach where the police chief there said he knows of only one sex offender living within the city limits.
“I’m guessing with just one, I’m not going to have that big of problem doing the policing on that,” Stagecoach Police Chief Michael Wethington said. “… We’re a small department, we’re not 24/7. At least for us, I don’t see a problem handling it even if we had more than one.”
But for Conroe Police Department, with a relatively large jurisdiction, it’s going to have to hire an additional employee to handle the registrations.
The city attempted to bargain with MCSO by offering to pay for 10 percent of their sex offender registrars’ salaries, which is roughly the workload created by the city. MCSO declined their offer.
“I think overall logistically it would have been better off for us,” Conroe Police Chief Philip Dupuis said. “Financially, sure, it probably would have been a little better for us financially because we would have only been paying for an employee over at the sheriff’s office that does a tenth of their registrations.”
Dupuis said he believes one new employee should be enough to register all of the sex offenders inside the city limits. He does not yet know how much the new employee will cost.
CPD already has a detective that goes out in the field to perform check-ups on sex offenders, Dupuis said, and the primary job of this new employee would just be the registration of the offenders.
“We don’t know what’s ahead of us,” Dupuis said. “We haven’t done it before. We’re still learning the process, and once we get it all done, we’ll have to go from there.”
MCSO is working with each city in the county to determine which offenders are inside city limits and which are in unincorporated Montgomery County. The sheriff’s office is still responsible for those sex offenders.
According to DPS, there are 775 registered sex offenders in Montgomery County. ..Source.. by Jay R. Jordan
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