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Justice 2 Sub-Committee, 13 Nov 2006

13 Nov 2006 · S2 · Justice 2 Sub-Committee

Item of business

Child Sex Offenders Inquiry

Sergeant Sileo: Watch on SPTV

Certainly. Tom—it is good to talk to you again. It has been a little while.We have approximately 1.6 million people in Broward County. Throughout the county, we have 1,300 sex offenders, of whom 97 are predators. As Mary Coffee explained, designation as an offender or predator comes directly from the sentencing court. Generally, a predator is someone who the court feels needs a little bit more attention, so to speak.We do most of the community notification that Tom Breedlove spoke of. However, probably because we have more resources, we go a little bit further in some things. We produce newspaper advertisements to say that one of those folks has moved in. We also alert the general populace to the fact that they can come to a community meeting, where anyone who is interested can come and hear about the sex offender laws, what sex offenders may and may not do and what the public may and may not do. We also provide a package about anyone on the register who might be in the local area. Usually, the package encompasses the details of several hundred people because we have so many of them in this area.We also use geo-mapping to pinpoint exactly where each of our sex offenders and predators are in relation to various landmarks throughout the county—schools, day care centres and public parks, for example. We know exactly how close they are to those facilities and the general public have access to that information on our website. People can see easily who is in a given neighbourhood.For the community notification meetings that I mentioned, we send out advertisements to the local area through a system of automated telephone calls. Within a radius of about 1.5 miles of the predator's home, we notify the general populace that such a person has moved into the neighbourhood and that a general meeting will be held at a given date, time and place where they will be advised of exactly who is in their area.Those community meetings have provided positive feedback and very minimal negative feedback—in fact, sex offenders or predators have sometimes asked to speak at the meetings to explain how and why they ended up on our website. As Mary Coffee said, many of them come from other states and are required to register with us when they move to Florida. They simply want to be heard and we allow them to do that as long as the thing does not get out of hand—and it never has. The meeting seems to be a pretty good forum for that. The general populace goes away a bit more educated as to what the laws are about and what the people are about.We have expanded the radius to 1.5 miles around the predator's home because we want to catch things such as schools and day-care centres that might be on the fringe of the mile that is required by law. In our county, every 30 days we check the sex offenders or predators within our servicing area to ensure that they are at the location where they are supposed to be. As a minimum, we check on them once a month. State law does not require that, but that is how our sheriff likes to do things here.We also partner the probation and parole folks—I am sure that Tom Breedlove does this as well, although he did not mention it—and visit the homes of offenders who are on probation or parole to double-check that there is nothing fishy and to ensure that they are doing what they are supposed to do in accordance with their court-ordered sanctions.

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Justice 2 Sub-Committee, 13 Nov 2006

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