A horrible thing has been happening in a town in Texas. A
family has, for the past month or so, been subject to a barrage of harassment.
Strangers have been driving slowly past their home in this Dallas suburb and
yelling horrible things at them.
The family has expressed fear for their lives, and of course
the police are taking this very seriously. They got to the root of the problem
quickly and are taking action to rectify it.
Apparently a month or so ago, the DPS mailed postcards to
each home in the community within four blocks in every direction from this
family’s home. The post cards gave the address where the family resides along
with the information that a registered sex offender lives there.
Except he doesn’t.
It was a mistake. The registrant in question once lived
there but then moved away. Apparently his moving back into the area triggered
the postcards to be mailed and gave his prior address, thus marking this
family, who have no registrants living with them and no connection to the registrant, to be targeted as sex offenders
and subjected them to a taste of the harassment, vandalism, and physical
assault that hundreds of thousands of registrants, along with their children
and family members, are subject to as a matter of course.
The police in the area are trying to determine how to better
assure that registered citizens are living where they should be.
A better task would be for them to determine how to prevent
vigilantes from using the public registry as a hit list.
If the registrant had been living in the house, is there any
reason at all to believe that the same incidents would not have occurred? No,
none.
And if they had, and he notified police and asked for
protection, is there any reason to believe that the story would have made
headlines in the local media, spurred law enforcement to immediate action, and produced 18 hits when entered into an online search
engine? No, none.
The message is clear: Incidents like this one, so shocking and urgent when they affect "normal" people, are acceptable in the eyes of law enforcement and
the public when carried out upon those on the registry. They are everyday occurrences; they create scarcely a ripple in the fabric of society.
In spite of the ordeal the innocent family has suffered,
they can at least be thankful there is no one living in their area of the mind
set and inclinations as Jeremy and Christine Moody of South Carolina.
They can also be thankful their ordeal is over. They need no
longer fear for their lives. That cannot be said for the several million
American citizens whose addresses are listed on public
sex offense registries throughout the United States.
We need to establish a LEO registry with names and addresses.
ReplyDeleteBeing made a public target certainly seems cruel and unusual to me....
ReplyDeleteOh, but wait, it's not punishment- it's reg-u-la-tor-y...!
(It was decided by the Supreme Court that registries are not punishment, but regulatory schemes). Yeah, right.
Perhaps experiencing life as a registrant will turn the hearts of that family. I hope Texas Voices or another SO advocate will contact that family to see if they can be drawn into the community of SO advocates.
ReplyDeleteThe entire concept of the registry is insanely cruel and should be abolished. But that will only happen when so-called sex offenders, not courts or politicians, take action. The action they can take is to boycott all registry countries, form voting blocs, create legal defense funds to make it too expense for the state to put people on the registry in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be happening more and more across the country . The police departments down play every complaint from the registerd citizens , so it does not get in the way of the extra income from the AWA and now the DE funked PFML with all its law suits . This is the point when the registry has to be removed completely after time served . The family should sue the registry for every thing it has for the incompetance of its monitoring . End the registry now before more people are harmed from the ignorance of whats called professionalism .
ReplyDeleteHow much did this cost the tax payers so far? (mailings, manpower, physical assets used such as printers, paper, envelopes, postage permits, etc.)
ReplyDeleteI imagine once a lawsuit entails and is completed, it will cost much more.
Good , keep those cards and letters comming . Let the law suit be the largest overage in expenditures for a failed system . They spent more than that already on promised retirements for psychological evaluations and retired police that already have benifits . Stop the flow of the money going to politcal corruption .
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