The Vegas Voice - Tracking Sex Offenders
Tracking Sex Offenders (Vegas Voice November 2005)
It seems as though every day we hear or read another tragic story about children and young women being abducted, raped and even murdered. They are being snatched from the streets and neighborhoods, in towns small and large, across the country.
And the perpetrators of these heinous crimes usually turn out to be repeat offenders, felons who have previously served time for similar offenses and have slipped undetected back into our daily lives. It's little wonder that we are afraid to let our children and grandchildren out of our sight.
Nevada has always had tough laws with stiff penalties for rapists and child molesters who are convicted. Since the mid-1990s, the state has enacted a wide range of laws to track persons convicted of sex offenses.
As the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I led the charge to require registration of sex offenders, to establish a statewide registry of sex offenders, and to provide the public with access to information about sex offenders in the community. I also supported legislation to require certain sex offenders to be placed on special lifetime supervision upon release from prison and to force all sex offenders to submit to genetic marker (DNA) testing and psychological evaluations
A recent report, however, showed that Nevada was the fifth worst state in the country when it comes to enforcing the sex offender registration laws on the books. Some 38 percent of Nevada's registered sex offenders were in noncompliance compared to about 5 percent in Florida and Arizona.
Because of our transient population, rapid growth, and inadequate law enforcement personnel and resources, many sex offenders are failing to register, as required by law, and those who register often disappear because they are not being tracked adequately.
In response, I joined with children's advocacy groups and law enforcement officials to revise our notification statute, put more teeth into its enforcement, and help find needed resources to make it work. My bill, SB 341, signed into law last session, made several important changes: It requires sex offenders to consent to warrantless searches as a condition of probation; authorizes employers to screen prospective employees for sex offense convictions; requires sex offenders to renew their driver's licenses annually, and denies them new licenses if their registration is not up-to-date; and mandates the suspension of any sex offender employed in the gaming industry who is not properly registered.
SB 341 also makes the notification web site (www.nvsexoffenders.gov/) more user friendly. By July of next year, you will be able to find any registered sex offender's street as well as just his zip code.
The web site will clarify the type of offense the registrant has committed in the past: Tiers 2 and 3, the most serious offenders, will be identified as such and their photographs will be available. Our web site has also been linked to nineteen other states as a first step toward creating a new National Sex Offender Public Registry (www.nsopr.gov/).
There is still more we can and must do. As Senator I have already submitted a bill draft for next legislative session to set residency distance requirements for sex offenders to prevent them from living near schools, parks, and other places where children congregate. I also support creating a pilot program requiring violent sex offenders to be monitored by global positioning satellite (GPS), as a few other states have done.
This is expensive, but we cannot afford to leave our children and grandchildren unprotected.
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