Syracuse.com : Sex Offender Residency Laws are Ineffective.
By Michael Hungerford
A recent article about the court ruling holding that New York state law pre-empts local sex offender residency laws left out a number of very important points. First, the public safety rationale for the local laws is at best questionable. According to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, most sex assaults are committed by persons who have no prior sex offense convictions. Since only those who have been convicted are on the state sex offender registry, most who commit sex offenses are not subject to any residency restrictions.
Many if not most sex offenses are committed against adults, not children, who are often used as the main justification for these laws.
In addition, the federal Center for Sex Offender Management notes that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults against minors are committed by family members, relatives, friends, baby-sitters or others known to the child or family. Again, no residency law will protect against assaults committed by those kinds of offenders, who often live in the very same household as the victim.
In Iowa, prosecutors are now calling for a repeal of a state residency restriction law. They criticize such laws because, among other things, "research shows that there is no correlation between residency restrictions and reducing sex offenses against children or improving the safety of children." The Iowa prosecutors also note that "law enforcement has observed that the residency restriction is causing offenders to become homeless, to change residences without notifying authorities of their new locations, to register false addresses or to simply disappear."
When offenders fail to maintain proper registration as a direct or indirect result of residency restrictions laws, such as those recently passed in Tully and previously enacted in Jordan, Cicero, Cayuga County and Auburn, no one is truly safer. Before spending the taxpayers' time and money on ineffective measures such as these residency laws, our local elected officials should first educate themselves on the facts and not just react to undifferentiated, hysterical fear that does not in fact protect our children.
