06/27/2012
WILMINGTON (KTLA) - Concerned residents in Wilmington held a community meeting Tuesday to discuss their options to stop sex offenders from moving to town.
The residents also wanted to find out why more sex offenders are living in Wilmington than in outlying areas.
The city's zip code is home to at least 177 registered offenders. Compared to numbers of offenders living in nearby zip codes, Wilmington's amount is remarkably high.
"Guess what? One community cannot take the burden for everybody else," said local activist Mary Gant.
When sex offenders are released from prison, most are required to return and register in the county where they were originally convicted.
Wilmington is in Los Angeles County -- where there are 18,200 sex offenders.
"They see the housing here is more affordable," said Joe Martinez, of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
"There’s not somebody who doesn’t have a job, doesn’t have a skill, that's going to find a place to live in Beverly Hills for 400 dollars a month."
Laws prohibit sex offenders from living near schools or parks, so many have chosen a Wilmington neighborhood near the Harbor Inn.
"There's a lot of them up there… and they're not being supervised well enough," one concerned resident said.
"We have to be careful that we don’t get ourselves in the position where I’m going to chase this guy out of my community and put him in your community," Joe offered.
But many residents weren't satisfied with that, and they offered the LAPD and local representatives their own solutions.
"Just put them out in the desert and put a chain link fence around it... put 'em in tents. Yes," one resident said.Others said they believed real change will come from meetings like the one held Tuesday.
"We're going to do it with our power -- the power of our voices, the power of our vote," Gant insisted.
Residents said they considered building a Boys and Girls Club to force sex offenders to move, but they found out that's not treated the same as a school or park.
They're planning to hold another meeting in August.
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