O.C. sex offender law picks up support but few convictions

Susan Kang Schroeder ticked off the facts of the case: A man bought a 5-year-old girl from Vietnam, used her as a sex slave for more than a decade and forced her to invite over friends whom he molested during sleepovers.

“She was made to do every possible sex act,” Schroeder said with a bluntness she honed as a prosecutor.

But this wasn’t a jury. It was the seven members of the Huntington Beach City Council. And if the aim of the Orange County district attorney’s chief of staff was to grab their attention with the story of one of the county’s most notorious pedophiles, it worked.

By night’s end, Huntington Beach was the latest city in Orange County to jump aboard the movement to ban registered sex offenders from parks, beaches, playgrounds and hiking trails.

In 12 months, nearly half of the county’s 34 cities have adopted laws aimed at turning parks and seashores into sanctuaries for children. They are among the most aggressive sex offender laws in California.

“Every time you turn around we have some kind of problem with people, with these sexual predators molesting our kids,” Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas told civic leaders in Seal Beach before they unanimously adopted the ordinance.

There are more than 100 laws on the books in various cities and counties restricting where sex offenders can live or visit, said Jack Wallace, spokesman for the state’s Sex Offender Management Board.

But Orange County is one of the first counties in the state to adopt a law banning all registered sex offenders — even those who haven’t been convicted of a crime against children — from going to a county beach or spending time in a county park. It carries a six-month jail sentence or a $500 fine.

So far, however, the so-called child safety zone laws have resulted in few convictions, and in some cities, zero arrests. Critics contend the ordinance, which was first adopted by county supervisors and then shopped to individual cities, is an ineffective feel-good law designed to appeal to council members who don’t want to seem soft on crime.

“This seems to me much closer to a political game of Trivial Pursuit in which the district attorney simply makes up rationales … which can’t be evaluated, and relies on the fact that the targets of the legislation are unpopular,” said Frank Zimring, a Berkeley law professor.

Supporters defend the ban and say the number of children saved by the laws will never be known.

“The effectiveness of this law will never show up on a statistic,” Schroeder said in an interview. “Because a sex offender did not show up in a park, a child did not get raped or molested.”

To persuade cities to jump aboard, the district attorney’s office has taken a forceful approach — sending ranking prosecutors and administrators to city council meetings and providing links to a disturbing video of Phillip and Nancy Garrido, the Northern California couple who kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard from a school bus stop and held her captive for 18 years.

In the video, Phillip Garrido is singing in a park with a guitar, while asking his wife whether she had a good shot of him with her video camera.

“I can see you good,” she says, while filming a little girl in the playground instead.

The aggressive tactics have rubbed some the wrong way. In Huntington Beach, Councilman Keith Bohr told Schroeder he didn’t think the issues were as black and white as she made them seem.

“We’re just looking for more things to have to enforce because it sounds good, and if we dare question it, ‘Oh, we’re weak on crime or we’re weak on sexual predators’ and that’s not the case,” he said. Bohr later voted against the ordinance, a minority voice.

Other cities, such as San Juan Capistrano, have delayed voting on the ban, citing legal worries. Irvine adopted the law, but only after stripping it down so it would apply only to offenders who have been convicted of committing crimes against children.

Police have also raised concerns.

When Huntington Beach adopted the law in November, Police Chief Ken Small insisted the council remove a provision that would have allowed sex offenders to enter a park if they had successfully filed for an exemption. Small said he did not want the liability of making such decisions.

“There is no amount of investigation that can be done to guarantee that a sex offender is not going to re-offend,” he told the council. “I would prefer that somebody in that situation not be carrying around an exemption in their pocket signed by me.”

In May, Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens told county supervisors that she could not envision “any circumstance under which I would grant permission for registered sex offenders to enter county parks.”

Sure enough, of the 14 registered sex offenders who have asked for an exemption, all but one have been rejected.

One man who asked for an exemption said he needed to go to Dana Point Harbor if he hoped to keep his job as a commercial lobster fisherman. Another asked for access to Irvine Regional Park for a family reunion. And another asked to go to Dana Point Harbor to celebrate 10 years of sobriety with his Alcoholics Anonymous group.

“My 10-year anniversary in recovery is a big milestone, and sharing it with those that helped make it possible is a big deal too,” the person wrote.

All of the applications were rejected. The lone exception, so far, was for a man who has a long history of employment in Dana Point Harbor and who’d had a clean record for 20 years.

Janice Bellucci, a state organizer for California Reform Sex Offender Laws, said it is not surprising that few people have asked for exemptions with the county.

“Many people are frightened,” she said.

She said other requests that have been denied — for example, a person who has repeatedly tried to go fishing with his father — could be unconstitutional.

Shawn Nelson, the county supervisor who pushed and drafted the law with Rackauckas, said he hopes to take the movement one step further — to libraries.

“I just think we’re trying to be creative and we’re trying to help people,” he said. “There’s not a perfect solution but we’re making progress. We want people in Orange County to feel safe.”

Meanwhile, Schroeder said she keeps a map of the county on her computer desktop and looks it over each workday. There are more cities on her list, and she said she intends to get to them.

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com