Megan’s Law Database Debuting Amid Concerns

The full force of Megan’s Law arrives in Orange County next week as a computer index of California sex criminals becomes available to the public and police in at least three cities take steps to alert residents of the most dangerous offenders.

The comprehensive database--an index contained on a CD-ROM--will list the whereabouts of 63,920 convicted sex offenders, including about 3,700 who live in Orange County. The information is scheduled to be accessible starting Tuesday, nine months after legislators vowed to protect California children by passing the controversial Megan’s Law.

A day before the CD-ROM’s debut, police will use old-fashioned handbills to directly inform citizens about as many as 18 “high-risk” offenders in three cities. Police cadets in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Garden Grove will go door-to-door in each offender’s neighborhood, passing out fliers with the name, photo and criminal history of each convict.

Fullerton police also plan to join the effort later in the week to identify a high-risk offender in their city.

Local law enforcement officials said the move is a calculated one aimed at quelling the publicity and protests that have followed the naming of individual offenders.

In Placentia, for instance, repeat child molester Sidney Landau shuttled from city to city after the police announcement of his whereabouts brought angry crowds to his doorstep. The same scene was repeated when Newport Beach police named James Lee Crummel as a known molester. Crummel has since been jailed on suspicion of murdering a child several years earlier.

*

“Unquestionably, it’s true to say we want to mute the fallout,” said La Habra Police Chief Steven H. Staveley, president of an association of Orange County police chiefs. “But a larger part of it is that we want the public to accept and evaluate this information in a thoughtful manner instead of in a panic.”

The Orange County police departments are acting in concert after a decision last month by the county’s police chiefs to seek uniformity in their approach to Megan’s Law.

Police countywide will also issue statements Monday about their policies and progress regarding alerting citizens about sex offenders. The overture shows that, while the CD-ROM’s release marks the final step in implementing the law, police across the state are still bedeviled when it comes to enforcing the landmark legislation.

“Every phase of Megan’s Law seems to have an incredible amount of difficult issues to deal with, but we’re just trying to muddle through,” said Santa Cruz County sheriff’s detective Latisha Marshall. “We’re just waiting for the first lawsuit.”

California law for decades has required sex offenders to register their addresses with local police. Megan’s Law takes that information for most sex offenders, rolls it into a CD-ROM database, which virtually anyone can view, and enables police to publicize the whereabouts of any sex offender.

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren will demonstrate that CD-ROM in a Los Angeles press conference today. But amid the crush of attention on the database, fundamental problems have emerged.

* The database may be up to 40% inaccurate, listing sex offenders long dead, incarcerated or dodging annual registration.

* The law allows police to publicize the names, pictures and even addresses of convicted sex offenders. But authorities fear that prospect may drive more criminals underground and overzealous citizens to vigilantism.

* While some departments are ready to make public next week the names and photographs of the most dangerous local sex offenders, many others, like the Los Angeles Police Department, still lack concrete policies on how to notify the public. Lungren has touted Megan’s Law, named after a 7-year-old New Jersey girl raped and slain by a neighboring paroled molester, as an unprecedented chance to provide parents with information they can use to protect themselves and their children. But a deep ambivalence about the law appears to run through the state, with even advocates saying they expect limited use of the databases.

“To take all your soccer coaches and look them up before the . . . season, that’s not going to happen,” said Jayne Murphy Shapiro, president of Kids Safe and a driving force behind the passage of Megan’s Law. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be in line waiting to get into the police departments” to look at the CD-ROM.

*

Perhaps the population most interested in the law is sex offenders themselves--police departments report child molesters are inquiring about how aggressively the law will be enforced in their cities. In Long Beach, one molester was keen to learn how tough the city would be because he wanted to buy a house there.

State officials say that Megan’s Law remains the best defense against sex criminals.

“The value still remains that we’re lifting the veil on sex offenders’ ability to exist in communities anonymously,” said Rob Stutzman, spokesman for Lungren. “It’s the best resource that has ever been available to the public.”

For the past nine months, state Department of Justice workers and police across the state have been scrambling to assemble the CD-ROM by the July 1 deadline. But the finished product remains flawed, officials acknowledged.

State officials told The Times in February that an estimated 20% of California’s offenders were unaccounted for.

But Stutzman acknowledged Thursday that the previously released figure did not include thousands of other offenders who never registered or simply became lost in police files.

Now state officials estimate that as many as 40% of the offenders may be unaccounted for.

The database includes 4,500 offenders whose whereabouts are listed as “unknown.” Of those, 148 are “high-risk” offenders.

Police in Anaheim, Long Beach and San Francisco have found deceased sex offenders listed in test versions of the state’s CD-ROM. One convicted child molester, Harvey Bess, was listed as still living in Long Beach even though he hung himself with a bath towel in Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles a year ago.

The latest prototypes list about 9,000 sex offenders believed to be living in Los Angeles, but the LAPD has records of only 2,574. In Long Beach, the CD-ROM lists some 1,400, even though the police there have only 850. San Diego police have records of about 2,000 sex offenders in their city while the state list has 2,800.

“The information is not going to be very accurate,” San Diego Police Lt. Jim Barker said, “especially on the first edition.”

Part of the reason for that, police say, is that sex offenders are criminal by nature and do not want to leave a trail. This problem has worsened since Megan’s Law was adopted last fall because sex offenders do not want to be exposed by police, according to a state Department of Justice task force that tracks down errant offenders.

*

Since the law went into effect last fall, police across the state have alerted neighborhoods to a handful of sex offenders living in their midst. In most cases, the offenders have fled due to neighborhood protests and media scrutiny.

A similar policy has led to problems in Santa Cruz County, which sent out fliers on its five high-risk offenders earlier this year.

“A year ago I knew where all my high-risk offenders were. They were all employed and living in a home,” said Marshall, the Santa Cruz detective. “Now I don’t know where they sleep any given night. . . . They’re moving around sleeping in cars, which is not what you want your sex offenders to be doing.”

In Orange County, Landau provided a high-profile example of this “Megan’s flight.” Dodging public scrutiny and alleged death threats, Landau shuttled from motel to motel through as many as four cities before a minor assault on a television cameraman landed him in a jail cell.

Most sex crimes “deal with issues of power and control,” said Long Beach Police Detective J. Craig Newland. When a sex offender is released from prison and becomes subject to public notification, “he can’t live anywhere and he can’t work anywhere. They’re losing control over their own lives. What we may be doing is making it so they need to rape another woman or molest another child.”

With that in mind, police in Huntington Beach and Irvine have opted not to join the mass announcements being made Monday by other Orange County agencies despite the presence of a single high-risk offender in each of those cities.

In Huntington Beach, police believed notifying the principal of a nearby school was adequate protection for the community. In Irvine, extensive interviews with the man and his psychologist have left investigators doubtful that the felon is still a threat.

“We looked real hard at this guy,” Irvine Police Lt. Tom Hume said. “And we don’t think he fits the intent of the law. He’s not a sexual predator who is likely to go out and commit some crime on a child in the community.’

* O.C. ACCESS: Database will be available at nine police, sheriff stations. B1