Officials Hear Arguments for U.S. Anti-Stalking Law

An Orange County lawmaker took his campaign for a national anti-stalking law to a sympathetic audience on Wednesday--hundreds of law enforcement officers and other professionals who deal with the problem every day.

“There is a need for such a law,” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) told about 550 people gathered for the annual Threat Management Conference at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. “Too often, the law stops at state lines.”

Royce was key in pushing California’s anti-stalking law five years ago and said the national legislation is needed to strengthen enforcement in all states.

The congressman was joined in his plea by Kathleen Gallagher Baty, a California resident who spent more than a decade dodging a former high school classmate she barely knew who terrorized her for years with phone calls and threats. He eventually followed her to Florida and tried to kidnap her at gunpoint.

“I can’t explain the terror you feel when you know that someone is after you,” Baty told the audience as the three-day conference got underway Wednesday.

“I became really angry,” Baty said, adding that her 3-year-old son at one point had to change schools because of the fears of other parents. “To have to watch this slowly creep into my whole family’s life is really disturbing.”

Sponsored by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Assn. of Threat Assessment Professionals, the conference brings together police officers, lawyers, social workers and psychologists from the United States, Canada, England and Australia.

Participants are discussing topics such as violence in the workplace, managing threats to government officials, interviewing mentally disordered offenders and the logistics of prosecuting dangerous stalkers.

“These problems have infiltrated every level of society,” said Greg Boles, an LAPD spokesman. “Each year our caseload goes up. Law enforcement needs to be proactive.”

Conferences like this can help, Boles said, because “people start talking to each other and, next thing you know, people are helping people. No one person can do everything--we’re all in this together.”

Boles said the first threat-management conference was held following the 1991 passage of California’s anti-stalking law, the first of its kind in the nation. That law, adopted in the wake of the shooting death of “My Sister Sam” actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed admirer, made stalking itself a crime.

Since then, Royce said, the need for federal legislation dealing with the issue has become increasingly obvious. “A determined stalker isn’t deterred by a state line,” he said.

Royce’s proposed national legislation has been passed by the House and is pending in the Senate. It would strengthen state anti-stalking laws by making a state’s restraining order--court orders preventing specific individuals from contacting or harassing their intended victims--valid nationwide.

The bill also carries stiff new penalties: Violators could face prison sentences of five to 20 years. The bill would make it a crime to stalk someone on federal property, including post offices, military bases and national parks, and would broaden 1994 federal legislation that now protects people stalked by former spouses or intimate partners, but not strangers.

“I think it’s a good law,” Boles said. “People are becoming more aware of the problem.”

It was Baty, however, who seemed to dramatize the problem most vividly.

“No one should have to live their life like that,” she said, adding that the man is now in a rehabilitation center in Fresno. Inevitably, though, the day will come when he will be set free.

“All I can do now is wait and wonder when his next move will be,” Baty said. “Trying to maintain some semblance of a normal life is a constant battle.”