Homeless in Arizona

It seems like the politicians have unfairly demonized "sex offenders" to make themselves looks like heroes. As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

The system also seems to be a "jobs program" for cops and other government bureaucrats. Jobs for cops to track down the addresses of these sex offenders. Jobs for bureaucrats to update the web pages which contain the addresses and photos of sex offenders.

If we are talking about "good government" and if these alleged "sex offenders" are so dangerous they should have never been released from prison. But I suspect most of these "sex offenders" are not a danger to society and it is a waste of time and money to require them to register with the police.

Hundreds of Arizona's sex offenders unaccounted for

Hundreds of Arizona's sex offenders unaccounted for

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Dec 2, 2012 12:27 AM

Arizona’s system of tracking and monitoring sex offenders is failing, with nearly a third of the state’s high-risk, registered offenders unaccounted for at some point during 2012.

Some also are homeless and living on city sidewalks and vacant lots because they have nowhere to go but the streets when released from prison. Going home is often not an option because family and friends have shunned them. Finding even temporary housing is difficult because most employers won’t hire them, homeless shelters have banned them, and a patchwork of state and local laws restrict where they can live.

Nonetheless, state law requires their registration to an address or “place of residence.” So authorities have created an unsettling situation: permitting clusters of homeless offenders to register to central Phoenix and Tucson street corners.

An Arizona Republic analysis of nearly 5,700 high-risk offender registrations found large concentrations of offenders in the central areas of Arizona’s two largest cities.

About one-third of these high-risk offenders had an unverified address at some point during the seven months The Republic conducted its analysis, meaning authorities could not report precisely where they were and the state database did not contain the current address of the offender.

Nearly 200 offenders were homeless statewide as of Nov. 7, many registered to street corners or intersections close to homeless shelters, where they have access to social services — but where they are no longer allowed to stay overnight. As darkness falls in these neighborhoods, dozens of the urban nomads can be seen spreading out cardboard and sleeping bags, creating makeshift bedrooms on sidewalks and vacant lots.

Though it is a potential crime for those convicted of dangerous crimes against children to live within 1,000 feet of schools and day-care centers, police working the streets struggle to discern whether offenders are complying with the distance restrictions. To do so requires research on the nature of their offense — determining if the law classifies it as a dangerous crime against children — and whether the offenders’ assigned risk levels prohibit their being at certain locations. Meanwhile, some sex offenders are registered to Phoenix street corners near such facilities.

Conflicting policies, rules and laws disperse responsibility for these homeless offenders, meaning some individuals evade registration because no single agency can be held accountable. At least five agencies have some role in tracking sex offenders. Most acknowledge difficulties in meeting their mission.

There is no evidence that sexual crimes have spiked in areas where offenders are clustered. In fact, the recidivism rate among registered sex offenders in Phoenix was found by one local study to be roughly 6 percent. The national average was pegged at 5.3 percent in a 2003 study by the U.S. Department of Justice.

But there is reason for concern when registered sex offenders are homeless or unaccounted for: If one in 17 is likely to re-offend and some are not being tracked, the public may be at risk. And studies show the likelihood of re-offending is higher when sex offenders have no support system or are driven to the social fringes. Experts warn that policy makers should improve the tracking of these offenders and find solutions to their homelessness before a horrendous crime is committed by one of these offenders.

Indeed, local and state policy makers have long known about the problem but have made no coordinated effort to fix it. Instead, apathy and unwillingness to dedicate taxpayer money to a long-term solution leave agencies with overlapping responsibilities pointing fingers at each other.

The Phoenix City Council commissioned a study in 2005 to evaluate solutions to sex-offender clusters and homelessness, but ignored most of its recommendations despite the study’s warning that the registry system needed repair.

There is little political incentive or public pressure to change the current monitoring system or to dedicate taxpayer money to housing for a group of ex-cons viewed largely as social pariahs.

But Arizona Sen. Leah Landrum Taylor, D-Phoenix, said the time to act is approaching.

“There’s no choice but coming up with some way to ... monitor these individuals,” said Taylor, the incoming Senate minority leader. “There are a lot of things we have to address this coming session, and certainly this should be one.”

David Bridge, managing director of the Human Services Campus, a central Phoenix non-profit that helps reintegrate the homeless into society, said the practice of registering sex offenders to street corners benefits no one — not the public, not the offenders, and not the government agencies spending taxpayer money on short-term solutions.

“It’s a time bomb,” Bridge said.

Regulatory web

Convicted sex offenders released from prison must register within 10 days, notifying the sheriff of the county and local police of the city where they plan to live. Those who move to a new address must re-register within 72 hours. That information is forwarded to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which maintains a public sex-offenders database.

Offenders released into homelessness must comply with the requirement by providing a general description of the place where they plan to be transient — near a shelter, for example, or at a specific intersection. The location must be updated with the sheriff’s office every three months.

The Arizona Department of Corrections supervises offenders whose prison terms are nearing an end and who have not been assigned probation. Those whose sentences carried with them post-release conditions are subject to community supervision by the DOC for the final 15 percent of their sentence. The DOC works to reintegrate them into society, placing them on the equivalent of parole outside the prison. They are required to wear GPS tracking devices during that time if they are homeless or were convicted of dangerous crimes against children.

County probation officers, meanwhile, are charged with monitoring offenders who were sentenced to serve probation either upon their release from prison or completion of community supervision. If these offenders are transient or homeless, they also must wear a GPS tracking device for as long as they have no specific address.

But there are shortcomings to the system. Once such offenders complete court-ordered supervision, they are no longer tracked. Though they are required to periodically re-register, there is no system to verify their whereabouts.

Locating homeless individuals can often seem like a futile proposition. Making sure non-monitored, homeless offenders keep their registrations up to date is also daunting. So checking in with them regularly at a designated corner near social-service centers became the most effective method for authorities to keep tabs on them.

State law assigns local police to enforce sex-offender registrations. The Phoenix Police Department’s South Mountain Precinct walking-beat squad, for example, verifies the registered addresses of sex offenders it comes in contact with on the streets of central Phoenix, particularly near the Human Services Campus. Often, the first sign that offenders are not living at their registered address is when they get into trouble with police. At that point, the onus is on police to figure out where the offender should be and whether he has complied with state registration requirements or probation.

The Phoenix Police Department’s Sex Offender Notification Unit refers repeated registration violations to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, but prosecutions are difficult if offenders are homeless. Though warrants may be issued for those whose registrations have expired, they often are not found until they commit another crime.

“It is more difficult to prosecute somebody that is transient,” said Rachel Mitchell, chief of the county attorney’s Sex Crimes Bureau. This year, the office had 38 failure-to-register cases set for trial.

Nowhere to go

Government policies and social pressures contribute to the homelessness that makes sex offenders so difficult to track.

Many have nowhere to go when released from prison. They tend not to be welcome back home because their families have shunned them. They may have committed sex crimes against family members, or the law may restrict their proximity to children.

Until 2008, one option was Central Arizona Shelter Services, the largest homeless shelter in Arizona and a popular destination because of its social services. Offenders there had concrete addresses and lived in close proximity to those monitoring them.

But CASS was overwhelmed by sex offenders using its facilities. During fiscal 2006-07, the shelter housed 436 higher-risk sex offenders. And after a sex-offender resident assaulted a child at a nearby park in 2007, CASS donors threatened to withdraw their support. The shelter closed its doors to sex offenders.

That left the displaced with two alternatives: find rental housing or sleep on the streets.

Rental housing is frequently out of reach because sex offenders have more trouble than other felons finding jobs and reintegrating into society.

State crime-free housing laws passed in 2005 limit the number and type of convicts allowed to live in any one residential complex. And in Phoenix, a municipal program on residential safety discourages landlords from renting to convicted felons, including sex offenders. The state and city restrictions are intended to discourage clusters of sex offenders in residential neighborhoods.

Even if sex offenders find a landlord willing to rent to them, they often don’t have the means to pay for it. The term “sex offender” raises flags with potential employers. Offenders don’t compete well against applicants with clean records or non-sexual offenses. Fast-food restaurants won’t hire convicted sex offenders because children patronize their establishments.

“They’re like ‘I’ve got nowhere to go. I can’t go to the shelter. I can’t go to the outreach shelter anymore. Where do we go?’ And they have a point,” said Phoenix police Sgt. Brian Freudenthal, who oversees South Mountain Precinct walking-beat officers monitoring central Phoenix.

While some Phoenix-area apartments, hotels and motels are willing to bend the rules for sex offenders by renting to them on a weekly basis, offenders, their supervisors and police all say it is often at inflated prices that are difficult to pay without a stable, well-paying job. One probation officer said a studio apartment without a kitchen can cost a sex offender up to $700 a month.

The result: People like Willie Boggess, 60, expect to spend the rest of their lives on the streets. A convicted child molester, Boggess has been in and out of prison so many times on subsequent charges that he can’t remember how many stints he has served behind bars.

Boggess, wearing a close shave and a filthy sleeveless shirt, spoke candidly about his life one night earlier this year as he readied a place to sleep on a sidewalk on the east side of Sixth Avenue near Buchanan Street. He was registered to Seventh Avenue and Buchanan — around the corner from Paul Laurence Dunbar Elementary School, 707 W. Grant St.

Boggess laughed when asked if he has tried to find a job. He said he checks “yes” next to the question on employment applications asking if he is a convicted felon. But he said he does not write an explanation, hoping for an opportunity to explain his situation in a job interview.

He rarely gets that chance.

“I’m gonna be homeless for a while,” Boggess said.

Losing track

The hustle and bustle at Phoenix’s Capitol Mall slows at sunset. As businesses close and government workers queue up at bus stops for the evening commute, homeless men and women settle into shelters at the Human Services Campus. The campus’ gates close at 6:30 p.m.

This is when sex offenders blend into the night with the rest of the homeless. Their few belongings in hand, they find nooks just off the streets in which to camp, often away from the intersection designated as their home in Arizona’s sex-offender registry. Sometimes, they seek the companionship of other homeless men or women.

On a night not long ago, Gregory Anderson, 47, joined the ritual. He is a Level 3 sex offender, meaning he is considered among the most likely to re-offend.

Anderson set down a soda cup, dusted off his sleeping bag and gently unfolded it atop a piece of cardboard of the same length. This was his temporary home, in an empty lot under the east side of the Seventh Avenue bridge, next to a scrap-iron yard. Anderson was under state supervision, monitored by its GPS tracking system via a transmitter strapped to his ankle. Every night, he checked in at the empty lot by 9 p.m. and was free to leave at 5 a.m.

Anderson and about a dozen homeless men and women he called “neighbors” slept there. They “watched TV” — a giant sports screen flickering to the east at Chase Field — as they talked, bickered and drunkenly ranted until, one by one, they fell asleep.

Anderson committed his sex crime at 21. He spent 19 years in a California prison, court records show. He has had other felony convictions since then, including at least two in Maricopa County.

After being laid off from a job in 2008, Anderson bounced between friends’ houses, leading to a failure-to-register charge. He is now registered as homeless at 15th Avenue and Grant Street.

Anderson pointed to his own experiences in explaining how many offenders become homeless. “You’ve got a lot of factors working against you,” he said.

Sometimes, offenders congregate at intersections where they are registered.

A camp formed about a year ago along the train tracks near Seventh Avenue in central Phoenix, where as many as 75 people were living — some in tents, others in cardboard shelters. Their belongings were piled haphazardly throughout the trash-strewn lot.

Word spread once a few of the offenders found they could live there without being bothered, said South Mountain Precinct’s Freudenthal. It took a month of police prodding and efforts by Human Services Campus providers to clear the area.

The state database of offenders contains four primary registration categories: homeless, a verified address, an unverified address and unknown whereabouts. An unverified address means the state does not know an offender’s current address, though some local agency might. In some cases, however, nobody knows where the offender is.

The Republic’s analysis of state registration information for high-risk offenders, current as of Nov. 7, and interviews with authorities determined that:

Despite the best efforts of policy makers to avoid clustering offenders, three central Phoenix ZIP codes — 85006, 85007 and 85009 — and a north-central Tucson ZIP code, 85705, were home to far more registered sex offenders than any others in Arizona. (See accompanying map.) The 85007 area had 254 registered sex offenders, more than 100 of them in the vicinity of the central Phoenix Human Services Campus or with an unverified address. Farther east, 156 offenders registered in 85006. An additional 120 registered in 85009. The Tucson ZIP code, meanwhile, was home to 125 offenders.

Near the central Phoenix homeless campus, 44 homeless offenders were registered to intersections or street corners. Statewide, there were 197 offenders registered to intersections or street corners.

One-third of offenders — 1,855 of 5,695 — in the state sex-offender registry during The Republic’s seven-month data analysis ending Nov. 7 had unverified addresses at some point, meaning authorities were not sure where they were. About 10 percent were unverified all seven months and remained unverified as of Nov. 7.

Phoenix’s 85007 ZIP code, which includes the state Capitol and the homeless shelter, had more registered sex offenders whose exact whereabouts were unknown than anywhere else in Arizona. There were 119 registered near the shelter as homeless, or with unverified or unknown addresses.

Data show only a small minority of offenders are on probation or parole at any given time, meaning there is little systematic monitoring of these offenders using GPS monitors. As of Nov. 1, just 22 of the state’s nearly 200 homeless sex offenders were wearing GPS monitors under state community supervision. Meanwhile, just seven homeless offenders were wearing GPS monitors while on probation with the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department.

Residents of central Phoenix have known for years they coexist with homeless sex offenders. Police who patrol the area and Human Services Campus officials have struggled to help neighbors and businesses feel safe.

Residents of the 85007 ZIP code receive several notifications a month indicating new offenders have moved in or registered to nearby intersections. They’ve learned to look out for one another’s families.

“We make sure there’s enough of us out here,” said Mary James, who lives with her daughter and two grandchildren near 12th and Woodland avenues. She and her neighbors have developed a buddy system. “One will watch the other one’s kids. There ain’t a lot of families here, because of all the sex offenders.”

Making it work

It’s no mystery why so many homeless offenders register in the same area. The central Phoenix Human Services Campus is a clearinghouse for homeless services.

Though sex offenders are barred from sleeping in the shelter, other services are available to them — hot meals, donated clothes, showers, toiletries, medical, dental and mental-health care, substance-abuse counseling, job training, education programs.

If they are homeless, this is where state and county officials prefer them to be — close to the services most offenders need.

Francisco Martin Valles, 40, suffers from severe depression and suicidal tendencies. On a recent night, he was dropped off by a friend around 9 p.m. at his designated sidewalk, next to an old city cemetery near 15th Avenue and Harrison Street.

Holding a trash bag of belongings in one hand and a convenience-store drink in the other, Valles talked about life on the streets and how helpful it was to have access to Southwest Behavioral Health Services counselors at the Human Services Campus.

Valles is a Level 3 sex offender, convicted in 1994 of child molestation. He was imprisoned on a 2010 failure-to-register charge and eventually was released under state supervision. But he was homeless. Court records show he admitted to failing to register and that he worried about where he would live or work after he was released.

“I feel like an outcast,” Valles said. “They should ... at least have a place for only sex offenders, for at least three to six months, so we can get a job, instead of releasing us from prison and throwing us out on the streets.”

Fear is common among Level 2 and 3 sex offenders because their photos and addresses are accessible online.

When the CASS shelter instituted its ban on sex offenders sleeping there, law enforcement allowed them to register at nearby street corners because it helped police track them, said Sgt. Barbara Francis of the Phoenix Police Department’s Family Investigations Bureau. The bureau oversees the Sex Offender Notification Unit, which checks on expired registrations and notifies neighbors when sex offenders register nearby.

From the county and state perspective, the system works — at least, for offenders wearing GPS tracking devices. Those wearing a device are visited periodically by a parole or probation officer to ensure they are sleeping at their designated street corner or lot.

But officials acknowledge that only a small minority of offenders wear tracking devices. The truly transient who do not wear tracking devices are free to roam, and technically are not the responsibility of the county or the state. That job falls to local police.

“It’s the most difficult population we have to deal with as far as attempting to stabilize them in the community, as far as employment, residence and such,” said Paul O’Connell, the Arizona Department of Corrections’ operations director for community corrections.

The population also can be difficult for police to deal with, particularly because they encounter conflicting policies. For example, some sex offenders — Boggess, to name one — were registered to street corners near schools, seemingly in violation of state distance requirements. Freudenthal, the Phoenix police sergeant, conceded that arrests on the spot for such violations are rare and that the line of responsibility is murky on who is responsible for deciding if they are violating the distance requirements.

“Until I come across that individual or one of my officers comes across that individual, we don’t know until that point of contact (that there is a violation) because nobody’s checked until that point,” Freudenthal said, “which obviously is a flaw in the system.”

If police find an offender registered near a school, they can file a report from which another unit determines if a warrant should be issued, Freudenthal said. In many cases, however, nothing happens because school-proximity restrictions apply only to a small group of Level 3 offenders.

Meanwhile, sex offenders sleeping on the streets are in perpetual violation of Phoenix trespassing, public right-of-way and camping ordinances. But police often overlook those violations for sex offenders because it’s their registered address.

Officers document contacts with sex offenders. They will tell offenders they cannot sleep at a given location, and order them to re-register at another. But because offenders have nowhere to call home, they generally end up registering at another street corner, violating the same city ordinance.

Because the largest number of offenders are concentrated in central Phoenix, an inordinate burden falls on the Phoenix Police Department to deal with these problems.

“This is a burden that I think should be taken on by the whole Valley,” Freudenthal said. “Many of the sex offenders I run into, they’re not from Phoenix. They’re from other parts of the state. They’re from other states.”

Those whose human-services facilities are overwhelmed concur that a permanent solution is overdue.

“Not that every sex offender is a raving maniac who’s going to do awful things, but I would hate to prove that this is a problem because something horrible happens,” said Bridge, managing director of the Human Services Campus that serves many of these offenders. “Registering them to street corners — if the intent of the law is public safety, I’m not sure how that increases the public safety.”

Mark Holleran, executive director of Central Arizona Shelter Services, called the issue “very frustrating — the issue won’t go away. This is in our collective best interest. Ignoring this issue will hurt us all.”

Reach the reporter at michelle.lee@arizonarepublic.com.

Warnings on monitoring of sex offenders largely unheeded

Warnings on monitoring of sex offenders largely unheeded

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Dec 2, 2012 12:30 AM

Policy makers since at least 2006 have known of the serious weaknesses in Arizona’s system for monitoring sex offenders: A study published that year warned it needed repair.

The 129-page study by Arizona State University researchers and the Phoenix Police Department found that nearly three out of four Phoenix sex offenders either did not live at their registered address or failed to register altogether. It recommended ways to create a more accurate and effective registry that would better monitor the most dangerous offenders.

“The system was completely and utterly dysfunctional the way it was set up,” said Charles Katz, the study’s lead researcher and an ASU professor of criminology and criminal justice.

Little has changed since then.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, who was on the council at the time of the study, conceded in an interview that the study’s recommendations remain largely untouched. Now may be the time to revisit the problems it identified, he said.

“Is it time for us to step up and take leadership? I think yeah, that’s a good point — we ought to,” Stanton said.

The study is the only recent, detailed examination of Arizona’s sex-offender registration system.

The Phoenix City Council commissioned it in part to understand what impact proposed new distancing requirements would have had on sex-offender “clustering” in the inner city, Katz said.

Clustering is the term used to describe a concentration of offenders living in one small geographic area, usually as a result of distancing laws that force them into small pockets in approved locations.

Researchers concluded that the 2,000-foot limit sought by the council would severely restrict legal living options for sex offenders in Phoenix, which in turn could encourage offenders not to register or update their addresses. The council heeded researchers’ recommendation not to increase the distancing requirement.

A key finding in the study was that Arizona’s registration information was largely inaccurate.

Researchers randomly selected 523 Level 2 and 3 sex offenders from among 932 registered as living in Phoenix at the time. Researchers concluded that roughly 60 to 70 percent percent of those randomly selected likely did not live at their listed address. Another 6 to 7 percent of offenders failed to register with the county altogether.

“Nearly every policy, procedure and law pertaining to sex-offender registration, community notification and residency restriction is based on the premise that accurate sex-offender residence information is collected and maintained by the police department,” the report said. “In reality, we found that the majority of Arizona’s most violent and dangerous sex offenders did not reside at the addresses at which they were registered.”

Researchers recommended policy makers not only clarify sex-offender address verification policies, but also delineate the roles and responsibilities of the various state, county and city agencies tracking offenders. The study also recommended a statewide data system for address verifications that could be shared by the agencies.

Among the study’s other findings:

Registration- and address-verification place a heavy burden on Phoenix police, who track the many registrations and homeless or absconded offenders in the city.

Public policies in effect at the time restricted housing options for sex offenders. Data showed the policies “could easily drive more offenders underground, and police would have even less accurate information about offenders’ locations.” Since then, housing options for offenders have been further restricted.

Anonymously polled government officials told researchers that perceived fears by the public and politicians led to over-regulation of sex offenders, pushing them into segregation in certain areas of the community regardless of risk level.

Those findings led to the following detailed recommendations.

Create an interagency task force: The group would organize the system and identify which agency was responsible for each step of registration, notification and address verification.

Clarify policies and assign responsibilities: The report concluded this would “prevent unintended gaps in coverage.”

Re-evaluate how sex offenders are classified: This would ensure assigned levels reflect the offenders’ likelihood of committing the same crime again. Agencies could then focus on the most dangerous sex offenders.

Increase funding for the Phoenix police sex-crimes unit: The report said the “sex-offender registration and address verification requirements are analogous to an unfunded mandate.”

Create reintegration programs for sex offenders: This would encourage them to register while helping them find employment, housing and social services to cope with the post-release process. Researchers noted that strong reintegration programs encourage offenders to cooperate with police, update their registration information and self-report inaccuracies in registration data.

“For obvious reasons, such measures are not likely to be immediately popular with some policymakers,” the report acknowledged. “But they are fair and just, and more, they could solve the problems that result in sex-offender noncompliance and inaccurate registry data.”

The study foreshadowed policy makers’ lack of interest in tackling problems growing out of sex-offender registration and homelessness.

Indeed, there has been little action at any level of government since the study was commissioned.

In 2005, lawmakers enacted limits on the number of convicted sex offenders who could live in certain kinds of housing.

That legislation, which Stanton helped craft, was proposed after residents of a Phoenix neighborhood complained that too many sex offenders were living in a single apartment complex in their midst.

Despite the law’s passage, sex offenders still cluster at addresses, especially in industrial areas.

An Arizona Republic analysis of registration data in one downtown Phoenix ZIP code, 85006, found 64 sex offenders registered to a single address: a motel near Sky Harbor International Airport.

In 2005, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano also enacted Operation Safe Neighborhoods to track down 957 sex offenders who had moved from registered addresses without notifying authorities. The Arizona Department of Public Safety used money budgeted for the program to form the Violent Criminal Apprehension Team, a joint operation with the U.S. Marshal’s Service that rounds up fugitives, including some absconders and sex offenders, DPS spokesman Bart Graves said.

The next development of note came in 2008 when Central Arizona Shelter Services barred sex offenders from sleeping at its downtown shelter.

Already facing a deluge of offenders taxing resources, the shelter was forced to take action after a December 2007 incident in which a Level 3 sex offender who had been sleeping there sexually assaulted a girl at a nearby park.

The Phoenix City Council agreed with the CASS policy change, and intended to find an alternative to house homeless sex offenders. Nothing has materialized.

In 2009, the Arizona Legislature’s Federal Sex Offender Registration Notification Act Study Committee met several times to consider whether to comply with federal guidelines for sex-offender registration and notification, including interjurisdictional tracking of sex offenders and mandatory check-ins with registration officials.

Victims’ advocates and state and county officials testified about Arizona’s practices, including what was working and what was not, records show.

But lawmakers concluded the current system was adequate and that it would be too expensive for Arizona to take on additional responsibilities proposed by the federal government, said state Sen. Linda Gray, R-Phoenix, who co-chaired the 2009 committee.

How the sex offender system works

How the sex offender system works

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Dec 2, 2012 12:30 AM

A web of federal, state and local laws and policies guide how Arizona sex offenders are registered, how the public is notified and which agencies are involved.

Federal:

The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act of 1994 sets up basic standards for sex-offender registration, requiring states to track sex offenders and confirm their residence every year for 10 years after they are released. It also requires those convicted of sexually violent acts to verify their residences quarterly for life.

Congress enacted Megan’s Law in 1996. It made sex-offender registration information public and created guidelines for community notification.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 established the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), which is the current federal standard. Arizona does not comply with SORNA’s registration and notification requirements, so it does not receive related federal grant funding. | SORNA http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/smart/sorna.htm

State:

Once a sex offender is released from prison, state law requires the Arizona Department of Public Safety to determine if the offender is registered. DPS must send information about the sex offender to the sheriff’s office in the county where the offender is registered. The convicted sex offender also must register with the county sheriff within 10 days and must be fingerprinted. | ARS 13-3825, B http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03825.htm

The county sheriff’s office must send information to the police agency for the city where the offender lives. The local law-enforcement agency enforces the registration requirement, assigning the sex offender to a notification risk level ranging from a low of 1 to a high of 3. Local police also must notify residents within 45 days of a sex offender’s registration within their area. | ARS 13-3825, C http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03825.htm

If the sex offender is under community supervision, the county probation department or the Arizona Department of Corrections may be responsible for all or some of the notification process for those offenders. | ARS 13-3825, F http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03825.htm

The state DPS maintains an online database of Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders. The Corrections Department also helps update registration information maintained by the sheriff’s office. | ARS 13-3827 http://www.azleg.state.az.us/ars/13/03827.htm

If the sex offender is homeless or does not have a permanent residence, the offender must register as transient every 90 days with the sheriff’s office, providing a “description and physical location of any temporary residence.” | ARS 13-3821, I | ARS 13-3821, A http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03821.htm http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03822.htm

Sex offenders must update their registration every year with the state Motor Vehicle Division, which is supposed to send daily address updates to DPS. Those who do not comply with this requirement are guilty of a Class 6 felony. | ARS 13-3824, B http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03824.htm

Sex offenders convicted of dangerous crimes against children are prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of a private or public school (kindergarten through 12th grade) or a child-care facility. Violators are guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. This does not apply to sex offenders on probation, minors or offenders living at an address before the school or child-care facility was established. | ARS 13-3727 http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03824.htm

Apartment owners are prohibited from renting more than 10 percent of units to convicted sex offenders. Only one of the renters among that 10 percent can be a Level 3 offender. The limitation does not apply to certain probationers, including offenders in treatment facilities, in supervised transitional programs where they receive services, or multifamily residences in industrial or commercial areas. | ARS 13-3825 | ARS 13-3826 http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03825.htm http://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03826.htm

Local:

The Phoenix Crime-Free Multi-Housing Program discourages landlords from renting to convicted felons. Through the program, landlords work with police to ensure there is no drug-related or criminal activity on their properties. | Program http://www.phoenix.gov/police/cfmhp1.html

Phoenix and other local police are responsible for enforcing registration requirements. Officers who encounter sex offenders on patrol must determine if they are living at their registered address. Police agencies also must notify local residents about sex offenders who have registered in their neighborhood and track offenders whose registrations have expired.

Phoenix city ordinances bar trespassing, loitering and camping on city streets. Sex offenders registered to street corners and sleeping there are in technical violation of these ordinances. However, if they are under state or county supervision, not sleeping at a designated street corner could violate terms of their supervision, making the ordinances largely unenforced.

Sources: Arizona State Senate Issue Paper: Arizona Sex Offender Registration and Notification, Nov. 30, 2009; Arizona statutes; Phoenix ordinances; U.S. Department of Justice; Phoenix Police Department; Maricopa County Adult Probation Department; and Arizona Departments of Corrections and Public Safety.