OK - Sex offenders in OKC trailer colony have to find new homes

Original Article

07/02/2012

By JULIANA KEEPING

About 70 men had to move out of manufactured housing at Hand Up Ministries' mobile home community in south Oklahoma City. A new law prohibits sex offenders from sharing such living spaces.

The thought of several dozen sex offenders moving out of their homes down the street has Priscilla Garza on edge.

Garza and her four children, ages 1 month to 14, live in the Arrowwood Mobile Home Community, about a half mile from a south Oklahoma City mobile home park run by Hand Up Ministries.

The 14-acre park houses 170 men, all of them registered sex offenders.

A new law that prohibits sex offenders from living together in manufactured homes takes effect Sunday. That means about 70 of the sex offenders at Hand Up Ministries' location may have to find a new place to live.

Though they've never bothered her family, Garza said she hates that so many sex offenders live near by. The mass move out isn't appealing either.

“I'll be keeping them under lock and key,” she said of her children.

Fighting the law

The statute approved by lawmakers in 2011 clarified an existing law designed to keep sex offenders from living together. Police said such arrangements make it more difficult to investigate criminal allegations.

Hand Up Ministries fought the new law and lost in federal court. It sued to stall the law's implementation until a judge could rule whether or not it was constitutional. U.S. District Judge Lee West dismissed the lawsuit Thursday.

Among the suit's claims: the new law violates the First Amendment rights of the Rev. David Nichols, founder of Hand Up Ministries, by stripping the organization of its right to practice its faith without government interference.

The nonprofit group also owns a 6-acre mobile home community, comprised of married and single sex offenders, women who have recently left prison, and non-sex offenders, Nichols said. The new law means three people living there had to move.

At its peak, the population of sex offenders at the larger trailer park was 270, Nichols said. That number dwindled to 170 last week in advance of the law taking effect.

Residents pay a weekly program fee of $100, Nichols said. They receive spiritual support, help finding work and rides to treatment centers. While the ministry helps them get back on their feet they must follow rules like a midnight curfew, no drugs and no alcohol.

Residents have committed a host of sex offenses. Some of the men got drunk and exposed themselves by urinating in public. Others swapped sexual emails or photos with underage girls. One man was caught having sex with his girlfriend in a convenience store restroom. Another molested a 12-year-old relative while on a meth binge.

All received the same label: sex offender.

The law requires those convicted of sex offenses to register as a sex offender each year from 15 years to life with the state Department of Corrections and local law enforcement. They are required to update their address with a frequency scaled to the severity of their offense.

Police cite problems

The residents at Hand Up typically live three or four to a trailer, Nichols said.

That first caused a problem for police in 2009, Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty said.

Convicted sex offender [name withheld], who lived at Hand Up, was lurking around a movie theater restroom Oct. 24, 2009. The father of a 7-year-old boy entered the restroom and caught [name withheld] in a stall with his child.

Officers arrested [name withheld] and executed a search warrant on the trailer, seizing several movies of child porn.

[name withheld]'s two roommates at the time had convictions for sexual battery and indecent exposure.

That scenario creates a problem for police trying to identify which felon owns the evidence that would support the criminal investigation, Citty said.

FL - Palm Beach County task force hopes to ease limits on housing sex offenders

Original Article

06/26/2012

By Alexia Campbell

They live in cars or sleep on the streets. Most homeless shelters and halfway houses won't take them.

South Florida cities have pushed hundreds of sex offenders underground with strict housing laws in recent years, critics say, but a new Palm Beach County task force is taking steps to reverse that trend.

It plans to draft an ordinance this summer that would make it easier for sex offenders in the county to find a place to live. One idea: Reduce the distance the county now requires offenders to live from schools, parks, day care centers and school bus stops from 2,500 feet to 1,000 feet.
- I'm sure this will tick off Ron Book, who is head of the Homeless Trust in Miami-Dade.  He's been pushing for these laws that force people into homelessness for years.  Why?  Maybe job security?

If county commissioners choose to pass such an ordinance, it would be the boldest change to sex offender laws in South Florida since local cities began passing stricter laws around 2005.

"I feel that it's the right thing to do," said Highland Beach Mayor Bernard Featherman, a member of the Criminal Justice Commission's sex offender reentry task force. "I've learned that nothing you make a decision about is popular."

Two county commissioners, Steven Abrams and Priscilla Taylor, said they would consider easing limits.

"I'm willing to take a look at it and weigh the pros and cons," Taylor said. "We want to make sure every individual has a place to stay. We just need to be very cautious because it affects children and adults as well."

Commissioner Paulette Burdick said she would not support the change, citing "reservations" about shrinking the buffer zone to 1,000 feet.

"It's not far enough," Burdick said. "I know it's a difficult issue, but the safety and security of our children is paramount."
- Not far enough?  So what is far enough?  You could make it 50 miles and it still would not prevent crime, protect anybody and continue to force ex-offenders into homelessness and underground.

State law requires people convicted of certain sex crimes to live at least 1,000 feet from places where children congregate and prohibits them from loitering within 300 feet of those areas.

Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties and many local municipalities enacted even more stringent residency laws after Jessica Lunsford, 9, was raped and murdered in 2005 by John Couey, a repeat sex offender who lived in her Central Florida neighborhood.

Palm Beach and Broward counties require their 2,178 registered sex offenders to live at least 2,500 feet away from schools and child zones. About 200 are listed as "transient," with no address.

That transient population is growing, making them harder to track, said Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Mark Jolly, who oversees the Sexual Predator/Offender Tracking Unit. Cities have also added to the confusion by passing their own offender laws, he said.

"We need consistency," said Jolly, whose team keeps tabs on where sex offenders live. "If an offender calls me and wants to know where they can live, it's nearly impossible to tell them. [Laws] change from one street to the other."

Sex offenders in Palm Beach County have been pushed to the fringes, he said. One of the few places that accepts them is a halfway house surrounded by sugar cane fields near Pahokee. Miracle Village is home to 86 offenders who live in the duplexes and participate in faith-based programs and job training.

In Broward County, offenders clustered in Broadview Park until the county passed its current ordinance that created a 2,500-foot buffer around schools, parks and playgrounds. Residents of the unincorporated area had complained about large numbers of sex offenders moving to their neighborhood because of the residency restrictions in surrounding cities.

Palm Beach County's sex offender task force, made up of community officials and social service agencies, wants to return to a law more similar to the state's. The ordinance would only cover neighborhoods outside city limits, so the task force needs to drum up support from local municipalities to adopt a standard law.

"Obviously, the politics of this issue are serious. It's a scary population for a lot of people," said Mike Rodriguez, executive director of the Criminal Justice Commission. "I wouldn't be surprised if all of this were to go nowhere."

NY - Homeless Sex Offender Trailers At Center Of Controversy (Police Harassment)

Original Article

05/23/2012

By Colleen Reynolds

A dustup involving Southampton Town’s homeless sex offenders has flared over the past week, with the Suffolk County Department of Social Services accusing police officers of harassing those staying at a pair of county-owned trailers by conducting multiple predawn identity checks over the past three months.

Department of Social Services Commissioner Gregory J. Blass, in a phone interview last week, criticized Town Police for intimidating the sex offenders who take shelter in the county trailers in Westhampton and Riverside by arriving at the unreasonably early hours of 2 and 4 a.m., for example, and rousing the offenders to check their IDs.

Continued intimidation, he warned, will lead to a breach in the county’s ability to track the homeless sex offenders.

“Checking for identification at the predawn hours may be their way of monitoring where they are, but if they persist in this unwarranted excess by doing it in the predawn hours, they will discourage the homeless registered sex offenders from using these emergency shelter trailers,” Mr. Blass said. “And if they do that, we will not know where the homeless sex offenders spend the night.”

Town Police Chief William Wilson Jr. said this week that his officers are not bullying or harassing anyone, but are simply fulfilling their responsibility to verify the residency of the homeless sex offenders for public safety purposes.

Mr. Blass, whose department is responsible for providing emergency housing to all of the county’s homeless, said his department cooperates fully with the police and that the trailer security guards share with officers the logs that document which offenders are present each night and what incidents, if any, occur. He said the police have made one too many predawn ID checks, saying they have done this about six to eight times since about February.

“If the police wake them up all the time just for the sake of checking their IDs and not relying on the security guards and the logs they have prepared, which are done honestly and professionally, then the system we have starts to fall apart, and they will avoid these trailers,” Mr. Blass said.

He added that his department recently enacted a new policy because of what he views as pre-dawn raids. The new policy, Mr. Blass said, requires police to have a warrant before entering the trailers. He said one officer ignored the policy last week.

The county is required by law to provide shelter to homeless sex offenders, while the Town Police are required to verify that the homeless sex offenders are living where they say they are living. If sex offenders do not register a change of address within 10 days of a move, they can be charged with a felony. The Westhampton trailer, located near the Suffolk County Police shooting range on Old Country Road, currently houses about eight offenders, while the Riverside trailer, which sits just outside the Suffolk County Jail, houses about 18.

Town Police Detective Sergeant Lisa Costa this week defended the police department’s recent action, adding that she was surprised by Mr. Blass’s stance. She explained that the police usually refer to a list of names provided by a trailer security guard.

“That did not suffice on its face for us conducting our felony investigations,” she said, adding that if police have to press charges against the homeless sexual offenders, they must have firsthand knowledge of where they are living and officers cannot rely on the lists provided by the guards.

Two recent arrests involving convicted sex offenders led to the recent instances, Det. Sgt. Costa said.

In one case, a Level 3 sex offender—the most severe classification leveled on sex offenders, which indicates high risk of repeat offense—living in Flanders, [name withheld], 56, was arrested in Riverside on May 12 after police said he forced a woman into the woods at knife point and attempted to assault her. Mr. [name withheld] was convicted of first-degree rape in 1983, according to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services sex offender registry.

In the other case, a 52-year-old sex offender, [name withheld], was arrested on May 9 through a joint investigation of the Southampton Town Police, Suffolk County Police and the U.S. Marshals. Mr. [name withheld], a Level 2 sex offender—a classification that denotes a moderate risk of repeat offense—had registered his address as the Riverside trailer, but authorities said he was not living there. Det. Sgt. Costa said his actual place of residence was undetermined, but that he was located and arrested in Amityville. Mr. [name withheld] was convicted of second-degree rape in 2003, the registry states.

“An occasional verification of an address for the common good and safety for the surrounding community clearly outweighs an inconvenience of waking someone up,” she said. “We are not trying to bully. We are not trying to infringe upon their sleep or their rights. We are simply trying to just get the job done.”

None of the homeless sex offenders living in the trailer could be reached for comment this week.

Mr. Blass said all of the recent attention on the Southampton Town Police Department, pointing to the Suffolk County district attorney office’s ongoing investigation of department record-keeping and other internal issues, have prompted the pre-dawn identification checks at the trailers. He said police officials are simply trying to deflect attention away from them.

“It seems a stretch to call the grand jury investigation and this upsurge in these predawn raids to monitor those already being monitored a coincidence,” Mr. Blass said.

FL - David Raymond, Homeless Trust Director, Retires Amidst Bid-Rigging Lawsuit

Ron Book

Original Article

05/21/2012

By Francisco Alvarado

The longtime executive director of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust is set to retire, ending his term atop the agency amidst an ongoing lawsuit accusing him of bid-rigging.

David Raymond, who has led the homeless group for a decade, improperly helped steer a $15 million contract to build a 300-bed homeless shelter in Homestead -- or least that's what another company that lost out on the bid claims in court. The claim is just the latest turbulence for the trust, which has also been criticized for its role in the homeless sex offender colony under the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
- Read more here and see videos here.

Back in 2009, a company named Jaxi Builders won a contract to build the Verde Gardens Complex, a Homestead shelter on the site of a former air force base. But another firm, Siltek Group Inc., says it actually submitted a better bid.

Oscar Soto, an attorney representing Siltek, says Raymond pressured officials from Carrfour Supportive Housing -- the non-profit agency in charge of the project - to ignore Siltek's offer, even though it was $2.6 million lower than Jaxi's bid. The trust controlled the project's budget, which consisted of county and federal public housing funds, which gave Raymond heft over who was chosen.

"Raymond was directing Carrfour on what to do," Soto claims. "He interfered with the bidding process. The end result is that the lowest bidder didn't get the job and it cost taxpayers a lot of money."

Officials for Carrfour declined to comment. Raymond could not be reached for comment on Friday, but Homeless Trust Board Chairman Ronald Book said Soto's accusations are absurd.
- Mr. Book has, in the past, been under investigation by the FBI, see here.

"Raymond's integrity is unquestioned," says Book, who in his day job is Dade County's most prominent lobbyist. "He is tireless in his work and guides our day-to-day operation with a level of commitment unknown in governmental circles."

Raymond leaves after a tumultuous tenure. This past March, the trust came under fire for allegedly failing to keep tabs on at least six homeless sex offenders that turned up in the Shorecrest neighborhood of Miami.

The men were part of the encampment that lived under the Julia Tuttle bridge until nonstop media coverage and complaints from elected officials forced the trust to find the men inexpensive housing throughout the county in 2010.

There's no timetable yet on hiring a new head for the trust.