WolfTeam News

In 1996 a Federal law went into effect which required all states to require convicted sex offenders to register, and to make that information available to the public.  The Alaska Department of Safety site is here.

Families with young children pay attention to sex offenders

Many people carry the new Internet enabled “smart phones“; programs are easily downloaded that tie into the State registry site and show where registered sex offenders are in relation to you and your smart cell phone.

It would appear as if the list of people registered as sex offenders has exploded over the past 15 years!  This isn’t because the number of high-risk perpetrators is increasing, but that we have lowered the bar of what constitutes a sex offender.  A person can wind up on the sex offender registry for urinating in public or, in 32 states, for “streaking” in public.  A person who gets caught with a prostitute can be placed on the list.

Probably the most problematic group of “sex offenders” are teens.  Teen boys that get caught having sex with younger girlfriends can be classified as a crime, even if it’s consensual.  In Texas alone, there are 4,000 registrants who landed on the list as juveniles.

A recent assessment of registered sex offenders in Georgia found that less than 1 percent were “predators,” defined as people who are driven by compulsion to commit sex crimes.

Round-the-clock media coverage of high profile abductions and murders has contributed to the general sense that society has run amok, when in fact violent crimes rates in most areas are generally lower now thane been since the ’70′s.

Sex offender registries are controversial by nature and some say, can generate more confusion than clarity.  For example, there are a growing number of cell phone apps that take information from the State registry site and place dots where the registered offenders are around your location. With this widely available technology people can get the idea some neighborhoods are much “scarier” than they might really be.

It’s been said that a better list would be to limit the list to the 1% of truly creepy individuals who really are offenders, rather than the teenager who made some poor choices on the list or the goof-ball who thought it would be cute to streak across the stadium naked.

The dots on your cell phone app might lead you believe the area of town you are in is worse than it may really be.