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Protect children by repealing perimeter law

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By The Quad-City Times | Thursday, December 14, 2006 | 9 comment(s)

The head of the Iowa County Prosecutors Association.

The head of the Iowa State Sheriffs and Deputies Association.

The head of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa.

Some powerful new voices have joined the call to replace Iowa’s useless, expensive and unsafe law banning convicted sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools or daycares.

They are echoing the call sounded for years by our own county prosecutor, sheriff and Davenport police chief lamenting the law that squanders police resources without making children any safer. We welcome these voices to this important discussion. Their presence gives cover to state lawmakers who have been scared to tinker with any sex offender law for fear of being labeled weak on crime. The fear is understandable. We just finished a campaign season jammed with malicious, misleading and flat-out wrong accusations. We fully expect that lawmakers doing the right thing by overturning the 2,000 foot perimeter will be attacked for coddling sex offenders.

Don’t buy it.

Iowa’s 2,000 foot law is becoming the reference point other states are using for how not to fight child sex assault. The law hasn’t saved one child from attack. Instead, it has clustered sex offenders in rural towns or pockets within larger cities that have no schools or daycares. In Davenport, that leaves seven registered sex offenders living within two blocks of the Scott County Family Y. Eight live in a in a five-block stretch of Heatherton, near Davenport’s Fairmount branch library.

Iowa already has toughened penalties for child sex offenders. Civil commitment procedures allow others to be locked up even after their prison terms end. The next step is to abandon the 2,000-foot perimeter and replace it with manpower and funding to track dangerous offenders upon release. A big part of that manpower and funding can happen when local police no longer are saddled with enforcing the 2,000-foot rule. Then they can respond quickly to real concerns about dangerous offenders instead of continually checking, rechecking and re-rechecking those ex-offenders who are complying with terms of probation.

It’s not coddling sex offenders.

It’s protecting children.

Lawmakers will need constituents who recognize the difference.