San Mateo Checks Past of Child Activity Volunteers

The child molester everyone fears could, perhaps, be here. Not scowling from the shadows. Not cruising in a van. But here.

Here, on the crisp baseball diamond at Martens Field, where rangy Little Leaguers run drills for their coaches. Here, on the playground of the Boys and Girls Club, where kids rocket off swings as a mother stands watch.

These places look wholesome. They probably are. Yet these days, who can tell? As one anxious mother put it: “There are many sick people around.”

And so this quiet bayside city has enacted the first law in the nation ordering every volunteer who supervises children to submit to a criminal background check. The law--which took effect last month--requires nonprofit groups from the Pop Warner Football League to the YMCA to fingerprint all coaches, tutors and mentors who look after one or more children without another adult present.

“It sends a message to perpetrators,” said Beth Salazar, executive director of the Peninsula Family YMCA, “that they will need to go somewhere else to get a kid to abuse.”

Seductive as that sounds, San Mateo’s child protection ordinance has generated a fair share of opposition. From the mayor to the president of a local Little League, critics have objected to the law on philosophical and practical grounds.

Underlying their criticism is a wounded, wistful question: Since when did good deeds and clean fun become so darn suspicious?

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In San Mateo, it started with Richard Allen Davis.

A few weeks before he abducted and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas, Davis stayed for a time at a homeless shelter here. He didn’t volunteer to coach girls soccer; he had nothing to do with youth activities. Still, parents panicked at the mere thought of such a monster in their city.

They drummed up 2,200 signatures on a petition urging their City Council to do something. The result: the child protection ordinance, which passed on a 3-2 vote after six months of tumultuous debate.

The winning refrains were simple and persuasive.

To those who questioned the law’s effectiveness came this rejoinder: If it saves one child from trauma, it’s worth it. Those mouthing off about privacy rights got this in response: If you have nothing to hide, why are you so worried?

As for those who griped about Big Brother paranoia tromping through all-American institutions--well, they got a talking-to about better safe than sorry.

And everywhere, the law’s boosters echoed the words of proud, protective dad Ray Mellado, who coaches his son on the Cardinals Little League team. “I think it’s fantastic,” he said, unloading bats and gloves from his car before a recent practice. “We should have started something like this long ago.”

Summing up the pro-ordinance argument, Connie Dennett, youth supervisor for the city parks department, said: “[Parents] place a tremendous amount of trust in the people who take care of their children. We need to do everything we can to make sure that trust is valid.”

Critics of the law say it sets a distrustful tone that insults and demeans good-hearted volunteers. Anyone willing to spend six hours a week refereeing see-saw wars or teaching layups deserves commendation, not suspicion, they say.

San Mateo’s law “seems an undue burden on people who were good in the first place to be volunteering at all,” said Ron Marblestone, a father of three who coaches basketball and soccer and helps out with Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts.

“It sets up an adversarial relationship with the volunteers,” said Linda Rosenthal, editor of the monthly San Francisco Peninsula Parent. “It’s hard enough to get people involved in community events without putting obstacles in their way.”

Critics also point out that most child abuse takes place in the home, out of reach of the ordinance.

San Mateo police investigated 58 cases of child molestation last year (compared with one homicide), but Capt. Edward Trucco said “hardly any” involved abuses by coaches or mentors.

“We’ve had cases involving Boy Scout leaders and cases involving child sports, but I’d say they’re less than 1% [of the total] in San Mateo,” Trucco said.

Given those statistics, Mayor Gary Yates said he could not sanction invading the privacy of 500 to 600 volunteers by opening them up to background checks. Opposing the ordinance was “like arguing against motherhood and apple pie,” he said--but vote against it he did.

“When there’s a clear and imminent danger, it’s excusable to [ask citizens to] forgo some personal liberties,” Yates said. “But not when there’s just a chance, a chance in a million, that [a volunteer] might be a pervert and might want to do something with your children.”

A parent himself, Yates said he makes a point of getting to know any adult who works with his children in school or clubs or on sports teams. “I don’t think we should leave that job up to the government,” he said. Especially, he added, because even the most thorough fingerprint program cannot possibly ferret out all the bad guys.

Indeed, when San Mateo nonprofits send fingerprints to Sacramento, the state checks them only against the California database. So there is no way to know whether the volunteer reviewing fractions with the Homework Club has molested kids in other states. What’s more, the free background check can take weeks to complete. And several organizations let the volunteers start working--unsupervised--with children while the review is pending.

Perhaps most troubling is the inescapable truth that even if a volunteer checks out clean, that is no guarantee of moral rectitude.

Last year, for example, a well-vetted staff member at the Boys and Girls Club in nearby Menlo Park pleaded no contest to molesting boys in his care. His employers had run his fingerprints through the state database and checked his name with the sex offender hotline but found “nothing that indicated any kind of problem,” executive director Jacqueline Glaster said.

If a soiled record does pop up, it is up to each individual agency to decide how to handle it. The city has not set guidelines on what kind of offenses should disqualify a volunteer from picking up a coach’s whistle or monitoring a reading group.

That flexibility allowed Daniel Dadoun, executive director of the Mid-Peninsula Boys and Girls Club, to accept a parent volunteer who recently spent 30 days in jail on two misdemeanor battery convictions.

Volunteer Erin Kaneaiakala came clean about her record--the result, she said, of a fight with an abusive boyfriend--even before submitting to the mandatory fingerprint check. Impressed by her candor, Dadoun said he has no qualms about letting her supervise her own son and a dozen other giggling, squabbling kids on the club’s playground several days a week.

“You’ve got to give human beings a chance,” he said.

But Kaneaiakala worries that others may not get the same chance she did.

In theory, she supports the ordinance. (“I don’t want weirdos around my kids,” she said.) Still, she understands why the Boys and Girls Club has already lost several volunteers wary of the fingerprint requirement.

“It might prevent people who have had problems in the past but who have done a complete turnaround from helping a club like this,” she said, as a girl tugged on her jacket looking for a hug.

To make sure that a distant frat house drug bust or a spotty driving record doesn’t scare volunteers from doing good deeds, San Mateo leaders have specified that the background checks should focus on felony convictions for violent crimes, drug crimes or sex crimes. Misdemeanors are to be listed only if there are three or more convictions.

But Michael Van Winkle, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said his agency’s analysts often lack the resources to figure out which charges ended in convictions. So when asked for background checks, they often produce comprehensive arrest records--which can include misdemeanors and charges that were never sustained in court.

That broad scope alarms John Riordan, president of the San Mateo National Little League. A long-ago misdemeanor might not be grounds for dismissing a coach, he says, but if it shows up on a background check, it is sure to be fodder for gossip that could embarrass top-notch volunteers.

“You talk about women gossiping, well, when it comes to things involving Little League, men like to gossip at least as much,” Riordan said.

The National Little League has been fingerprinting coaches for about five years, starting long before the city enacted its ordinance. So far, Riordan said, only one volunteer of questionable background has turned up--a coach who had been arrested on minor drug charges more than a decade earlier. The league’s directors did not let him coach again.

Riordan, who was not then serving as a director, says he would have balked at cutting a coach because of a lone drug arrest long ago. That incident made him uneasy about his league’s fingerprint program. And he believes that expanding it to the entire city will stir up more trouble than it prevents.

“The whole thing upsets the hell out of me,” he said.

But proponents of the law insist that the child protection ordinance will live up to its promising name.

As word of the background checks spreads, volunteers with ulterior motives will learn to stay away from San Mateo, the YMCA’s Salazar said. “Probably about 95%, maybe 100% of the creeps will screen themselves out,” she said.