Outside View: Tracking sex offenders
The following editorial appeared Monday in the News Tribune in Tacoma.
The state has a problem with its sex offender registry: It has outsourced an important job without also delegating the money to do it.
While the registry is a creation of state law, day-to-day management of it depends on local police departments and their ability to assign manpower to the task. The result: Communities vary widely in their ability to track sex offenders.
One example: Tacoma has one police officer assigned to track registered sex offenders living in the city. Seattle has four.
Such disparity cannot be explained by Seattle’s larger population. While Seattle might be almost three times the size of Tacoma, residents there are far less likely to be living near a sex offender. There are 1,500 registered sex offenders in Seattle – 375 for each police detective assigned to the sex offender unit. In Tacoma, there are 1,200 registered offenders and one detective to watch them all.
Uneven enforcement of sex offender registration laws invites trouble. Citizens depend on the registry to know if a sex offender is living in their neighborhoods. But the registry is only as useful as it is accurate – and only as accurate as the time and effort dedicated to making sure offenders are living where they say they are.
It’s no secret that many of the state’s 20,000 registered sex offenders don’t check in with the local police department in a timely fashion – or at all. About 1 in 5 sex offenders is convicted of failing to register with local authorities, and many more fugitives are not caught or prosecuted because cops are stretched too thin.
Communities probably can’t afford to police the registry to 100 percent accuracy, but they should be able to expect some uniformity in enforcement across city and county lines. A sex offender task force created after the murder of Zina Linnik, of Tacoma, recently offered a proposal that could help, recommending that the state assist local police in keeping track of sex offenders.
The state need not take over sex offender monitoring. It could help by providing money to pay local police officers to do the work. If lawmakers go that route, they should tie the funding to the number of sex offenders living in a community rather than just population size.
No one can say if a stronger and more uniform system of sex offender tracking would have saved Zina. What is known is that the man charged with her murder, Terapon Adhahn, was not registered as he should have been when Zina was kidnapped from an alley behind her Hilltop home in July. But as a level 1 offender – the category deemed least likely to reoffend – Adhahn might not have caught the attention of police or neighbors under the best of circumstances.
Still, there remains a role for the state to play in helping shore up the state’s sex offender tracking system. The Legislature should pay heed to the current disparity as it decides how to improve the system next session.