Police Lose Track of Sex Offenders in Chicago Area
This is one of our editors' picks from our ongoing roundup of Investigations Elsewhere.
In Chicago and its surrounding counties, sex offenders are flouting a law that requires them to register both their home and work addresses with local authorities – and getting away with it, reports the Chicago Tribune.
The Tribune found that as of mid-January, nearly 800 sex offenders had been missing for a month or more. But warrants had been issued for just 135 of them.
Police still search for missing offenders without warrants, but the Tribune calls those efforts "hit-and-miss." A lack of manpower and the limitations of working without a warrant hobble such efforts. For instance, Chicago police enter "investigative alerts" into their computer system, but those are rarely seen by other departments. In January, an eight-week sweep for offenders netted 40 arrests, but that level of effort is apparently rare.
Cara Smith of the Illinois attorney general’s office told the Tribune: "No one would disagree that a warrant for every offender would be terrific. It's just not that easy."
According to the report, authorities say that sometimes warrants aren’t issued "because the law isn't clear on who can issue them."
But, the Tribune counters, "even in cases where the law allows warrants to be issued, they often aren't."
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1 comments
DJChitown
Feb. 9, 2010, 10:39 a.m.
I am a registered sex offender in Chicago. And every year, I go to the Chicago Police Department for my annual registration. Well, one year I went on the day that I was required to register and the officer warned me not to wait so long to register. You can re-register within 10 days or your annual date. A few weeks later I was marked as “non-compliant”. I contacted the Illinois State Police Sex Offender Unit and was told that I was compliant but they hadn’t updated it on their website. An employee also told me that it takes Chicago a long time to feed their updates to the ISP. So if warrants were issued on these “non-compliant” sex offenders it would expose the weakness in the registry and open up a floodgate of lawsuits. The system isn’t perfect and the registry isn’t effective. Those 800 non-compliant sex offenders do not go out there and re-offend while they are allegedly on the lam. They are either in jail; out of state; or deceased. And the website just hasn’t caught up with the process. Lastly, because of the tough residency restrictions, many are forced out of their homes and living on the street or in shelters. They are required to re-register every 3 days. If they miss one of those days, then they are non-compliant, but the following week they will re-register however the website won’t be updated for weeks.
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