Sheriff wants to track sex abusers

Kootenai County is vying for a federal grant that would pay for staff and equipment for full-time monitoring of the county’s nearly 300 sex offenders.

“There’s a certain segment of our society that needs to be monitored, and they’ve proven to us they need to be monitored,” Kootenai County Sheriff Rocky Watson said.

For the first time, sheriff’s employees this month visited the homes of every registered sex offender in the county and found 10 percent were not abiding by the state’s registration laws.

“These are the people we need to be able to identify, and we need to be able to keep closer tabs on them,” said Sgt. Ken Lallatin, the sheriff’s detective who headed the countywide sweep. “It’s about protecting the community and our children.”

Lallatin said the federal grant the county has applied for would help establish a full-time unit dedicated to crimes against children and enforcing sex offender registry laws.

If Kootenai County is awarded the grant, the federal government would provide $249,000. The county would chip in $62,000 in matching funds.

Several of the 18 sex offenders arrested in the sweep failed to notify the sheriff’s department they had changed their address, or failed to complete the required annual registration, Lallatin said.

Court records revealed a handful of the arrested sex offenders have been in trouble before for failing to comply.

Lallatin said the offenders receive reminders to complete the annual registration and receive an address verification card in the mail every four months.

The excuses officers heard from noncompliant sex offenders ran the gamut.

“It was everything from I forgot, I was too busy, or I just didn’t take it seriously, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” Lallatin said.

One, who had moved out of Kootenai County and was arrested in Harvard, Idaho, told officers he hadn’t updated his registry information because the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles was too long, according to court records.

Another said he wasn’t aware of the registry, despite the fact that sex offenders initial several times and sign their names on a sheet informing them of the registry requirements when they’re sentenced for a sex crime.

The Sheriff’s Department has six arrest warrants for sex offenders who couldn’t be located. The department is obtaining additional warrants for other sex offenders suspected of breaking the law.

Watson said he isn’t surprised by the results of the sweep.

“These people that are registered sex offenders have little respect for society or the law,” Watson said. “Compliance is usually only through force in compliance.”

Lallatin said he and a crew of three other sheriff’s employees went home to home. They asked to conduct searches of offenders’ homes and computers.

“As a result of that we ended up gaining so much information, knowledge and intelligence on those people,” Lallatin said. “Up to that point, these people had just been a name on a list or a name on a file.”

Lallatin said the officers encountered “some pretty scary people” during the sweep.

But, he said, “One of the other things we found was that just because someone’s on the list doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a threat to society or anyone else.”

Lallatin said there were several registered sex offenders who had committed a statutory type crime – those, for instance, who had sex with a 16- or 17-year-old when they were 18 or 19.

Lallatin said the home visits helped the Sheriff’s Department identify which of the offenders “need closer monitoring.”

“These home visits truly need to be done on a semi-regular basis,” he said.