Laws With Raw Edges

By federal and state law, local authorities are now required to assess the danger presented by sex offenders being released from prison. If a former convict is considered dangerous and likely to repeat his crime, local authorities can notify the community in which he plans to live.

In California, police departments must also allow the public access to computer files displaying names, photographs and other information about child molesters and other sex offenders living in their jurisdictions.

Variations of these laws have been in place since Washington state imposed one in 1990. Since then, a number of nationally publicized murders of children by paroled sex offenders have led to laws in other states, as well as to the new federal mandate.

The thinking behind this development is simple and compelling: Parents deserve to know when sexual predators live nearby so they can better protect and warn their children. But community reactions can and do go far beyond that.

Although guidelines on implementing California’s sex offender law are still being written, police in Placentia decided against waiting. They passed out fliers last month in the neighborhood where Sidney Landau, a twice-convicted sex offender, now lives. Afterward, neighbors telephoned police whenever he left his residence; they demonstrated outside his home with signs and bullhorns. When the uproar reached his employer, Landau was fired. All of this could have been expected.

From Washington state to Florida and New Mexico, released sex offenders have been hounded from town to town and even run across state lines. Commonly, the paroled offender is turned down for jobs and denied apartment leases. In Wyckoff, N.J., neighbors demanded and got 24-hour police surveillance of a paroled sex offender until he was committed for a psychiatric evaluation. In 1987 in the Bay Area community of Rodeo, reaction against a paroled mutilation-rapist was so strong that he had to be evacuated from the town under a police guard.

Appalled neighbors have been known to pour on the pressure, honking car horns and shining flashlights into a target home well into the night. The house of one released offender was burned down before he could move back into it. Relatives who take in paroled family members have been threatened with eviction. Washington state officials clearly knew that all would not go smoothly when they attached a provision to their 1990 law that shields authorities from liability for any public harm to an offender.

And there have been other unintended consequences: an innocent man beaten because he resembled the widely publicized photo of a paroled molester; panicked residents notifying police whenever any man near a school, playground or day care center resembled an average-looking parolee who had been convicted in a child molestation case.

New Jersey’s version of these laws is being challenged in federal court under the argument that that it constitutes punishment on top of prison sentences already served. Opponents also say that these laws give rise to vigilante activities and prevent re-integration into society of offenders who have served their sentences. The fact is that many neighbors of paroled sex offenders don’t care a whit about fairness and re-integration. They are likely to react as one Placentia neighbor of Sidney Landau did: “We want him out of here. That’s for sure.”

Local officials throughout the state would do well to mark those words and fashion a response that clarifies that these laws are meant to inform, not to incite. That clearly won’t prevent community outrage, but it might help maintain a semblance of civil control over it.