This is exactly what happens when Lawmakers allow entities and private persons to create their own registry, which supposedly duplicates the state registry. Lawmakers fail to recognize they are at FAULT HERE and they place the public at risk by allowing erroneous information to be published. Secondary dissemination of registry information should be prohibited! Laws that require the State registry to be accurate, do not apply to private registries, and that is the FAULT of lawmakers.11-5-2011 Colorado:
DENVER -- Just feet away from a Denver daycare playground, just a few months ago, you'd find Richard Holman's apartment.
“My son is only ten years old and he was scared,” says the mother of his latest alleged victim.
She says Holman kidnapped and molested her son in August, but because Colorado’s system for tracking dangerous men like him doesn’t always work, she could never have known he lived so close.
“I think it's erroneous to think the database is perfect,” says Lance Clem who is the spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Public Safety and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation which runs the state of Colorado's sex offender registry.
We showed Clem numerous omissions we found on both the state’s registry and its city counterpart called the Unified sex offender registry or SOTAR, which you can access from most cities’ home pages.
That’s the problem. Like the 10-year-old boy’s mother, most people don’t know that there are several databases for finding who lives next door. As FOX31 Denver uncovered, depending on which database you access, if your neighbor is a registered sex offender, it may show him and it may not.
We tested five different zip codes around the metro area in each of the two registries and found alarming results.
In Englewood's zip code 80112 we found 24 sex offenders registered on the Unified Registry who never appeared in that zip code on the state’s registry. On the state’s registry that same zip code showed 18 other sex offenders who never appeared in that zip code on the Unified registry.
In the Denver 80211 zip code, 17 sex offenders showed up on the Unified registry who never appeared on the state's registry, and the state’s site showed 15 offenders living in that 80211 zip code that the Unified registry did not.
It was a problem in all the zip codes FOX31 Denver tested. The discrepancies appeared in the Arapahoe county 80122 zip code, in the Jefferson County 80002 zip code, and in the Denver 80210 zip code.
“We have something like 12 to 15 thousand sex offenders, that's a lot of people to keep track of,” said Clem. “It’s a problem in how the law was written.”
Douglas County runs the Unified Sex Offender Registry and says Colorado law is to blame for the reason the databases are so different.
They say, by law, the C.B.I. can list only the most dangerous sexually violent predators, and the Unified registry is less restrictive. Even so, we found dozens of names of violent and non-violent offenders missing on both databases.
FOX31 Denver also found instances where the addresses on the two databases are different.
“Out of the total numbers of people that we're talking about and we're talking about 10,000, to have a few dozen where the information isn't up to date it's always going to happen,” said Clem.
Dr. Jerry Yager is director of training for the Denver Children's Advocacy Center which helps children who have been sexually assaulted.
“I think the utility of those lists is to inform the public there is something in your neighborhood that has a history of this,” said Yager. He says incomplete databases are only part of the problem. He suggests the more serious concern is that police don’t always know where sex offenders are really living. Case in point, Richard Holman who lived right next to a daycare.
“Why did we make laws that say these people have to register? It's so we can track them and know their whereabouts and know what's going on and if we're not doing a good job with that then that's a problem,” said Yager.
Representatives for both the state’s registry and the Unified Registry say because of the different laws governing both databases, parents will always get the most complete information from their local law enforcement agency.
Dr. Yager also suggests just talking to your children about what is and is not appropriate touching. He says if children are properly prepared, they are much less likely to be victimized. ..Source.. by FOX31 Denver
