Where are they? A Spatial Inquiry of Sex Offenders in Brazos County
Where are they? A Spatial Inquiry of Sex Offenders in Brazos County
(Version 8/30/06)
Anonymous
ABSTRACT: U.S. has several laws that restrict the movement of registered sex offenders. In 1994, Sexually Violent Offenders Registration Act reshaped the way law enforcers managed Registered Sex Offenders in the United States. The offenders are generally required not to live within the Child Safety Zone, which is a certain distance from premises such as schools, parks, and daycare where children tend to congregate. In Brazos County, Texas, this distance is proposed as 1000ft. Geographical Information System can be a useful tool to map the location of these offenders. Spatial inquiries reveal that high percent of the offenders reside within the Child Safety Zone. Immediate and Lateral risk zones were created around each offender to measure the risk each offender brings to the community in which they reside. Web-based spatial service of this information creates higher public awareness and help local community in daily decision-making that can help reduce sex-related crimes.
INTRODUCTION
Several studies in the last decade have analyzed sexual abuses to males and females under the age of 18 in the United States (Tjaden and Thoennes, 1998; Greenfield, 1997). Finkelhor (1994) informed that one in five females and one in seven males get sexually abused by the age of 18. The fear, both personal and altruistic, of becoming a victim to sexual abuse consciously or semi-consciously exists in the community. This fear has been re-kindled even more with the recent unfortunate events of sex-related crimes throughout the nation.
In an attempt to redeem neighborhoods of these mishaps, law enforcement agencies have regulated various sex offender restriction statutes that can help manage the risk posed by sex offenders. While there have been numerous statutes in place for about four decades now, the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offenders Registration Act (42 U.S.C. 14071 et seq.) of 1994 reshaped the way law enforcers managed Registered Sex Offenders (RSO) in the U.S. This law required the convicted sex offenders to register and notify their movement to law administrators. Information of offenders such as their name, age, gender, height, weight, race, and details of offense are provided to the state authorities such as the State Department of Public Safety.
After the death of Megan Kanka by a convicted sex offender living across the street in New Jersey, President Clinton signed an amendment to this law, requiring all states to make the information of pedophiles and rapists available to the general public (Beck & Travis, 2004; Engeler, 2005). After this law was signed in May of 1996, locals are informed on the whereabouts of sex offenders in their community. This notification system exists in all the states, and makes it mandatory for the offenders to inform the respective state authorities about their movement anywhere in the United States. This information is then made public to notify the community of the offender’s details. The Jacob Wetterling Act sets minimum standards by federal administration for states. Individual states, on the other hand, can impose more stringent requirements on the offenders. In Texas, the Code of Criminal Procedure, SB1054, Article 42.12, Section 13B (Texas Legislature Online, Seventy-Eighth Legislature) mandates the Child Safety Zone (CSZ) for the State of Texas to be “within 1000 feet of premises such as school, day-care facility, playground, public or private youth center, public swimming pool, or video arcade facility, places where children generally gather.”
As per the regulation, sex offenders were restricted from going on or within this CSZ until the recent amendment in May of 2003 (Texas Legislature Online, Seventy-Eighth Legislature; SRC-LBB S.B. 1054 78(R) Bill Analysis). By this amendment, this restriction does not apply to a defendant while the defendant is in or going immediately to or from a (1) community supervision and corrections department office; (2) premises at which the defendant is participating in a program or activity required as a condition of community supervision; (3) residential facility in which the defendant is required to reside as a condition of community supervision, if the facility was in operation as a residence for defendants on community supervision on June 1, 2003; or (4) private residence at which the defendant is required to reside as a condition of community supervision.
Registered offenders in Texas are supervised through (1) Frequent contact with the supervising officer, (2) Restrictions on community activities, (3) Mobility restrictions, (4) Special conditions of release, and (5) Mandatory treatment. Offenders are restricted from residing in or within the child safety zone. Presently, the State of Texas stipulates anywhere from 200 - 1000ft for this zone, which follows the drug-free zone stipulations used in the state. These laws have been introduced with a notion of creating buffer areas or zones so as to curb the recidivism rates in sex offenders. Along with the efforts to reduce recidivism and reintroduction of the offenders into the community, common crime analysis procedures require moving these offenders away from the proximity of potential victims.
The movement of RSOs within and between different states with varying restriction laws makes it difficult for the offender and the supervising authority to exactly determine the distance between the residence of the offender and the CSZ. However, current trends in modern technology such as use of Geographic Information System (GIS) have made it feasible to closely supervise the mobility restrictions of the registered sex offenders. GIS provides a powerful tool to map these locations, efficiently update the data, and frequently check for violators residing in the CSZ. This study therefore inquires: (1) how many sex offenders reside within the Child Safety Zone?; (2) how to identify known offenders when a probable victim is reported missing?; and (3) how can this digital mapping system help notify the local community?
BACKGROUND
In order to justify the use of spatial technique to check the risk from offenders to community, it is important to look at studies that have looked into this issue other ways such as recidivism and psychological assessment; and recidivism and proximity, to check the risk from offenders.
John Lafond (2005, p. 46) reported that in a 1989 Special Report by Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism: A Review, only murderers showed lower recidivism than rapists. Larcenists, burglars, and drug offenders had comparatively higher recidivism than sex offenders. Nevertheless, recidivism in sex offenders has received great attention and has been studied by researchers for sometime now (e.g., Alexander, 1999; Furby, Weinrott, & Blackshaw, 1989; Grubin & Wingate, 1996; Hanson & Bussiere, 1998; Looman, Abracen, Serin, & Marquis, 2005; Marshall, Anderson, & Fernandez, 1999; Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1998). The psychological evaluation of offenders and the risk they incur on the community have been studied recently by Abracen and Looman (2005), Andrew and Bonta (2003), Craissati and Beech (2005), and Levenson and Cotter (2005) among others.
Craissati and Beech (2005), on the other hand, suggest that actuarial assessment presently takes into consideration official previous offence history and not allegations or undisclosed offences. Therefore, it is likely to underestimate the risk an offender actually may bring to the community in the future and predicts reconvictions rather than behavior. Craissati and Beech’s study used dynamic variables such as persistent truanting, bullying, and school refusal to capture behaviors close to sexual offending. They mention that reconviction rates never represent the true offending rate in sex offenders. They also suggest that reassurance by improving the capacity of supervisory agencies to monitor offenders and taking early action is needed. In order to monitor the adjudicated offenders, agencies such as the Parole Board and the Board of Pardon have developed restrictions that control the mobility of the offenders in the community. These restrictions have received wide attention recently. Robertson (2000, p. 109) suggested that:
“…an understanding of geographic trends of registered sex offenders, especially as they relate to schools and daycare facilities, may help police narrow their suspect lists in open cases, to those individuals contained within their registration database, living within a close proximity to the victim procurement site, who pose a high risk of recidivism”
Terry Thomas (2000), suggested that the Sex Offender Act of 1997 had unforeseen consequences. The implication of this law required to set up a mechanism of registration to help police decide the risk due to a dangerous sex offender. This idea of registration of sex offenders was premised on three arguments. These were (1) to help the police identify the suspects after a crime, (2) to prevent crime, and (3) to act as deterrent (Home office pp 107). Mentioned in the case of Doe v. Miller & White (2004), the US District Court of Appeals judge in Iowa cited the lack of research indicating the relationship between proximity and recidivism (Levenson and Cotter, 2005). Mechanisms to help police search and identify a suspect after crime have been less researched. For example, GIS can be effectively used to monitor the offenders and a suspect’s proximity to a reported crime. This study therefore, provides a methodological approach to monitor and notify the local community about the sex offenders in their community using GIS.
Federal restrictions provide the framework for restrictions advised by states across U.S. Residence restrictions for the sex offenders vary from state to state. In Illinois, least restrictive distance is 500 ft, whereas California restricts the living of sex offenders within a quarter mile of schools (Levenson & Cotter, 2005). Texas law allows these restrictions to vary for each offender, depending on the type of the offense committed. Presently the parole board assigns this distance based on the individual’s offense. This distance can be anywhere within or up to 1000 ft. This makes it difficult for the law enforcement officials to keep a check on the movement of these offenders. To alleviate these difficulties, the Texas legislature has been forwarded a petition to make the restrictive distance uniform throughout the state of Texas.
STUDY AREA AND DATA
The area under study, Brazos County, Texas, has a population of about 152,000 (US Census, 2000), comprised predominantly of the populations of the cities of Bryan and College Station, and Wellborn. About 88% of the population of Brazos County resides in the twin cities of Bryan and College Station. The Texas Department of Public Safety (TXDPS) lists 164 registered sex offenders in the zip codes of Brazos County. Also included on this list are the names of each offender (including alias names), date of birth, gender, race, current residential address, information pertinent to the offense, and a latest photo with other information. Without a geographical system in place to track registered sex offenders, the Cities of College Station and Bryan for long have not been able to check the violators who reside within the child safety zone. It was thus necessary to provide the law enforcement authorities with tools that can help them locate such violators residing in neighborhood areas on or within the child safety zone.
The schools, parks and day-care centers in Brazos County were geo-coded using parcel-level data. These form the premises of locations where children gather. The location of each sex offender was geo-coded by centroid of the parcels of their residence. These addresses were obtained from the Texas Department of Public Safety. The TXDPS conducts random checks at the offender’s residence location every month.
METHODOLOGY
Spatial Inquiry into Location of Sex Offenders
Spatial information for Brazos County was provided by the City of Bryan Information Technology (IT) department. The two main themes created for this analysis were (1) the Child Safety Zone and (2) the location of residence of each offender.
This study required the geo-coding of daycare facilities in Brazos County obtained from the Department of Family and Protective Services, schools and parks in Brazos County. These layers are used as basic themes to develop CSZ. The address information of RSOs was obtained from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Sex Offender Database. The spatial data of Brazos County parcels was used to geo-code (single field (file)) the “USaddress” field with the address database files of the daycare centers and the registered sex offenders in Brazos County.
Matching interactively, the unmatched addresses were searched and selected. About 12 of the 164 addresses of the sex offenders were either located out of the Brazos County or could not be located in the Brazos Parcels file. The layers with information on parks and schools in Brazos County were buffered for a distance of 1000 feet. These layers were appended and merged together to form the new dissolved layer of all the buffers that formed the Child Safety Zone. The playgrounds, public or private youth centers, and public swimming pools are a part of the schools in Bryan and College Station. Once the sex offender locations were geo-coded, spatial query was made to locate the offenders residing in the CSZ (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Methodology used to develop tool to locate Sex Offenders
Locating Known Offenders
By using the Texas Case Classification and Risk Assessment tool, community supervision officers have established three different levels of risks associated with each registered sex offender. The risks based on the nature of the crime are high, medium, and low (Texas Department of Criminal Justice Website). These risk-levels are assigned by the department of corrections, the department of social and health service, and sentence review board. The methods of notification to communities differ for each state. (HOW) For high risk offenders, the TXDPS requires to send postcards to one-mile radius of a non-subdivided area and three-block radius of a subdivided neighborhood within seven days of release and ten days of move of a sex offender to their neighborhood. The Critical Risk Zones are classified based on the risk level of the offender as High, Moderate, and Low and by proximity Immediate and Lateral risk.
We utilized the standards stated by Megan’s Law as the baseline to geographically analyze the victim procurement site. The Critical Risk Zone of each sex offender was based on the distances specified in Megan’s Law. Two zones: (1) Immediate Risk Zone: three Block distance from the residence of the offender and (2) Lateral Risk Zone: one mile distance from the residence of the registered sex offender was created as the ‘area of influence’ for each offender. We termed these as the “Critical Risk Zones.”
Community Notification
The spatial mapping technique to locate sex offenders can be used for community notification. The spatial database developed to locate the offenders in Brazos County was created as a web-based service using ArcIMS. This web-based GIS interface was launched at the City of Bryan police department website. This website helps access the spatial geo-referenced information regarding registered sex offenders, child safety zone, and geographical reference. This information was pre-conceived to be accessible for local community to check the location of sex offenders in their community.
RESULTS
The descriptive analysis of the registered sex offenders residing in Brazos County, Texas showed that 73% of the offenders were White. Over 10% of offenders have committed a crime at least 2 or more times, about 5% of the offenders are females, over 10% of the offenders are high risk offenders. 44.2% offenders were aged 15-30 years old when the crime was conducted and 35% of them were 30-45 years old. Over 50% of victims are aged 15-25 years old and over 80% (131) of the victims were females.
The offenders in the CSZ were categorized based on their risk levels. Thirty-eight were identified as low risk offenders, twenty-seven as moderate risk offenders, and twelve as high risk offenders. An investigation, similar to that conducted by Walker, Golden, and VanHouten (2001), revealed that six of these high offenders were within a 1000 ft proximity of at least one daycare, four were near schools, and 11 were in close proximity to parks in Bryan and College Station. Four offenders were identified within 1000 ft of at least one daycare and one park in Bryan. One high risk offender, who had been charged with indecency with females aged 12 & 14 in 1982 and 13 in 1990 reside within 1000ft of one daycare, one park and one school in Bryan.
Figure 2: Mapping of residential location of sex offenders in relation to schools, parks and daycare centers in Brazos County
The spatial query showed that an alarmingly high percentage of 55.41% offenders resided in the Child Safety Zone. The proximity, as shown in Figure 2, of the offenders to the schools, parks, and day-care centers in Bryan/College Station was not in adherence with the state restriction of 1000ft in Texas. Although this percentage may vary with continuous moving in or out of the offenders in Brazos County, the findings at a certain snapshot of time reveal an extremely risky situation.
Critical Risk Zone
The zones here are classified based on the risk level and proximity, being categorized as the following six divisions: (i) Low Immediate Risk Zones, (ii) Low Lateral Risk Zones, (iii) Moderate Immediate Risk Zones, (iv) Moderate Lateral Risk Zones, (v) High Immediate Risk Zones, and (vi) High Lateral Risk Zones (Fig 3).These zones may or may not overlap for two or more offenders based on the distance between each other. Using GIS, the location where the child was reported missing can be geo-referenced. Upon identifying that location, a list of registered sex offenders that lie within the immediate risk zone and lateral risk zone can be generated for the purpose of investigation.
This risk level analysis provides a platform from where authorities can identify the registered offender in the closest proximity of a reported victim, or provide some indication to where to direct the investigations after a probable victim is reported missing.
Figure 3: Critical risk zones (both immediate and lateral) for each offender based on their risk
Community Notification
The press release of the new web-based GIS service was announced on May, 5th 2005. Access to this website was monitored and automatically recorded to measure the number and sources of hits. The hits on the City of Bryan RSO shared about 50% of all the hits on the City of Bryan website immediately after the press release of the new web-based tool. Compared to the hits received in the earlier months, the month of May 2005 received 200% higher hits compared to daily average hits on other months starting June 2004 to April of 2005.
DISCUSSION
There has been history of development to monitor the sex offender. Convicted sex offenders are monitored in different ways now. Some states use the parole officers to monitor the movement and status of a sex offender, while in Florida; satellite surveillance technology is being used to keep track of sex offenders at all times. So far, extensive resources, both financial and technical, are required to support satellite surveillance for all the offenders in the nation. GIS could be an effective alternate method of monitoring these offenders using the methods proposed in this study.
The high percentage (over 55%) of violators living in the CSZ can be a concern for the local community. It has to be noted that this high percentage was owing to the fact that these offenders are currently have restrictions that does not follow the 1000ft distance. Cross verification of race of offenders with their current photos on the website revealed that high percentage of ‘White’ offender were reported because the general classification was categorized as Black or White. Hispanic looking individuals were classified as White as well. Nevertheless, at the discretion of the authorities, the violators can be notified to relocate and can also be suggested locations that lie outside the Child Safety Zone, but still accessible to their job.
Risk Assessment tools to predict risk have been investigated for sometime now (Hanson & Thornton, 2000; Thornton, et al., 2003). The Static 99 risk assessment tool generates four categories of risk: low, low-medium, medium-high, and high and has been validated by Beech, Friendship, Erikson, and Hanson (2002) and Thornton (2002). The Critical Risk Zones follows the three categories of risk: High, Moderate, and Low. These zones can help inform law enforcement officers to identify the registered offenders in the closest proximity to a victim reported missing or at the location of crime. This spatial service can be used exclusively by authorities to investigate a reported crime. The categories of risk used here are not empirically evolved, but have been used commonly by majority of the states in the U.S.
The web-based GIS service was available for local community so as to increase awareness among the community about registered sex offenders’ residence location in reference to their homes, work places, as well as places that they visit on a regular basis. The website provides a sense of geographical reference to law enforcers and to our community. Increased access to website indicates increased public awareness and interest to use web-based mapping-services as a communication tool. This web-based service helps individuals relate the location of sex offenders with their residence and the path their kids take to commute to school. Levenson and Cotter (2005) argue that if these restrictions actually work in reducing sex crimes, contrary to the assumption that molesters who intend to re-offend, place themselves in close access to potential child victims, the sex offender would travel to another neighborhood to seek victims without being recognized.
CONCLUSION
Web-based GIS has recently received increased acceptance as an interactive tool to communicate policy reforms and public participation in community development. In certain cases, it has been suggested to be an effective tool in communicating information and ideas to and from the community (Jankowski & Nyerges, 2003). Jankowski and Nyerges conclude that participation GIS can help us organize the way we think people interact during work in participatory settings. GIS is being adopted more than ever in governmental organizations in U.S. It is used to manage in case of fire-related and crime-related incidents. Sex offenders that bring potential risk to the community can be managed using similar web-based service. The methodology proposed in this article can also be an effective tool and more importantly cost and time-effective in managing risk. With the availability of GIS, geo-coding of offenders’ residences and availability of themes such as parks and schools, sex-crimes related to children can be efficiently managed. Therefore, this study hopes to encourage the use of GIS technology in investigating crime-management strategies, especially related to child sex crimes.
One primary limitation of this study is the use of a common 1000ft buffer to create the CSZ. The restriction distance varies between each state. In Brazos County, the restriction distance varies with offender. The significance of the distance is more perceived than empirically tested. Therefore, a future scope of this study would be to empirically examine the influence of restriction distance on the risk to the community using GIS.
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