[Bulaba Khan Jones]

So what happens when you mix child molesters and a sex offender registry in the state of California? Remove people from the list and destroy information is the correct answer to making society safer, that's what.

SACRAMENTO — Ninety percent of California sex offenders will no longer be required to register with law enforcement for life under a bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed Friday.

The change is one of several sweeping alterations to the state’s 70-year-old registry contained in SB384 by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco.

The bill allows most sex offenders to petition beginning in 2021 to be removed from both the public and the police registries 10 to 20 years after they are released from prison, as long as they have not committed another serious or violent felony or sex crime.

Brown had previously indicated he would sign the reform, which for years stalled amid pushback from reluctant lawmakers who did not want to be seen as soft on crime. The bill was pushed by law enforcement agencies, that argued that California’s sex offender registry is so large that officers and the public can’t determine who is at high risk for reoffending. The registry has 100,000 sex offenders — meaning 1 in 400 Californians is on it.

California is one of four states to require lifetime registration.

“With this reform, our law enforcement agencies will be able to better protect people from violent sex offenders rather than wasting resources tracking low-level offenders who pose little or no risk of repeat offense,” Wiener said in a statement. “Our sex offender registry is a tool used to prevent and investigate crimes, and these changes will make it a better and more effective tool for keeping our communities safe.”

The state’s registry will have now have three tiers, with the first tier allowing people convicted of crimes like misdemeanor sexual battery, misdemeanor possession of child pornography and indecent exposure to petition to be removed from the registry after 10 years. Tier one has the largest number of sex offenders, with up to 65,000 people potentially falling into that category.

Those offenders would not all come off the registry at once since a portion of those people would not have finished waiting the mandatory minimum of 10 years on the registry after their release from prison.

The next tier includes people convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, oral copulation with a minor under 14 years old and non-forced sodomy with a minor under 14 years old. The second tier, which requires sex offenders to register for a minimum of 20 years, has potentially 24,000 people.

Crimes like rape, sex crimes against children 10 and younger, repeated sex crimes and sex trafficking minors, put a sex offender in a third tier that requires them to be on registry for life. That tier has an estimated 8,200 people.

LGBTQ groups like Equality California supported the bill, saying the changes will help gay and lesbian people who were targeted by police for crimes like consensual sex among adults in a park.

“Gov. Brown’s signature will restore livelihoods and help restore the registry as a tool for investigating those who pose a real danger to society,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California.

Under current law, when a person is required by a judge to register as a sex offender, there are few ways to have their name removed from the registry, regardless of the underlying offense. That’s resulted in a registry that includes 650 sex offenders whose last convictions were in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the Sex Offender Management Board. Another 3,000 were last convicted of a sex crime in the 1960s and 1970s.

Supporters of the bill, including scholars and victim advocates, argued that research shows that the longer people are crime-free, the less likely they are to reoffend, thus keeping sex offenders on the registry for decades does not reduce crime.

Local law enforcement agencies estimated that they spend two-thirds of the money intended for supervising sex offenders on paperwork for low-risk offenders. That money, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley argued, would be better spent monitoring higher-risk offenders.

The sheer stupidity, the absolute lack of any logical reasoning, and idiocy of this is pretty astounding.

When you don't have enough cops to monitor all the low-risk offenders and your priority is on high-risk offenders (no fucking shit?), what do you do in the state of California? Do you reallocate resources to high-risk offenders like someone who isn't a brain dead retard and also keep the registry in place as a tool for investigations? No: you dump most of the registry altogether, while somehow believing it makes rational, logical sense that getting rid of information altogether makes society safer.

The notion that 100,000 people are being constantly tracked and monitored is also absurd, but I'm not surprised the article includes that; the registry exists as a tool, not everyone on the list is monitored on a daily basis.

Additionally, the mention in the article about how people who don't commit any sexual crimes for decades are possibly never going to again, and thus warrants a purge of information from the registry is equally absurd: the registry exists as a tool for investigation, and if someone hasn't committed a sexual crime in decades, the obvious, non-retarded response is to not spend resources and manpower investigating that person unless there's a reason, because they're clearly low-risk.

I think the lesson learned here is that if you want a completely destructive, counterproductive, and over-the-top (literally) irrational response to normal, routine, bureaucratic issues, just hire a Californian. (Sorry Zag)

[Zagadka]

Whelp, can't wait to see someone trying to defend this. My job would be a lot easier if I just ignored half of it.

Pretty shameful.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

It literally makes no sense. Every single reasoning in support of the changes (getting rid of 90000/100000 entries because 100k is a big number, or being too stupid to assign manpower to high-risk cases so you simply get rid of people and information on the list which is used for investigations, or being too stupid to reassign low-risk offenders to the low-risk category so you simply get rid of them all from the list, etc) makes zero sense whatsoever. The article does mention how people convicted of having sex in public could be added as sex offenders, but again, using that as an excuse to nuke most of the registry also makes absolutely no sense.

Somehow, though, a group of idiots with power in California sat down and read these reasons and said to themselves, "This makes logical, rational sense to me."

[Zagadka]

They can track minor drug charges for the three strikes laws, and the parole for those minor drug charges, but can't be bothered to track child molesters and rapists. Seems legit.

[Ter]

California haha.
We are not surprised.
The sex offender list is too big.
Think about that.

I am sure there are lots of people on sex registries because they had sex with a girl barely younger than 18 and they were a little above eighteen. That never made sense to me.

[anasawad]

Yea, I was wondering about that too. How the hell would the number get so big ?
Then ofcourse I remembered feminists and.... well, it all connects.

Now honestly, personally I would be against removing anyone from the registry and my typical answer would be why are they still alive ?!, But, knowing how things go in California and other places in the US and Europe, and who gets put in there. We should look further into whos names are being removed Because honestly many names shouldn't be there to begin with.
You can literally be considered a rapist if you had consensual drunk sex in there, all it takes is someone reporting , that alone is too many extra names added.

I don't know, The whole system there should be overhauled to make sure justice is served correctly. And after that, the registry wouldn't need much revision since those who're there guaranteed to deserve to be there.

[AFAIK]

Sounds like it will create a lot more paperwork if they have to review the case every time someone asks to be removed.

[blackjack21]

Do you see why I'm on the political right now?

[Zagadka]

Do you see why I'm on the political right now?

This doesn't really have anything to do with right or left.

(totally called someone saying that immediately, Bulaba)

[Hindsite]

This doesn't really have anything to do with right or left.

(totally called someone saying that immediately, Bulaba)

But were not those that did it and said to themselves, "This makes logical, rational sense to me" on the left?

[Zagadka]

*shrugs* Not everything someone on the left does is because they are on the left or has anything to do with being on the left. Police departments were in favor of this, too.

Personally, I'd prefer to ease their burden by removing trivial drug convictions and three strikes rules.

[Hindsite]

*shrugs* Not everything someone on the left does is because they are on the left or has anything to do with being on the left. Police departments were in favor of this, too.

Personally, I'd prefer to ease their burden by removing trivial drug convictions and three strikes rules.

Most of the left-wing are lawless people that want to eliminate laws that hold them accountable for their lawlessness.

[Zagadka]

Many on the right (I would not be so arrogant as to paint a demographic in large part) are authoritative people who want to pass laws that dictate freedom of thought and expression to control behavior of people they deem undesirable.

[Hindsite]

Many on the right (I would not be so arrogant as to paint a demographic in large part) are authoritative people who want to pass laws that dictate freedom of thought and expression to control behavior of people they deem undesirable.

I think you got that backward. However, if you have proof, let me see it.

[Zagadka]

You first. My statement was clearly a parody of your insane rant.

But if you want proof... well, you're the one demanding the government prosecute people for kneeling.

[Godstud]

Well played.


This is a horrible mistake by the government(since that who is doing it), and I am sure that people on both the left and right(as mentioned already), find this to be appalling. It's a bipartisan issue. You want your families and children safe from sexual predators. You don't need to be on a side to recognize that.

[The Immortal Goon]

The bill was pushed by law enforcement agencies, that argued that California’s sex offender registry is so large that officers and the public can’t determine who is at high risk for reoffending.

I like that the right, with their extremely squishy ideology of feelings, came charging in to try and blame the left immediately.

In another thread we'd be getting some trite junk like this:



But now supporting law enforcement is some kind of left wing conspiracy or something because something something.

[Drlee]

They can track minor drug charges for the three strikes laws, and the parole for those minor drug charges, but can't be bothered to track child molesters and rapists. Seems legit.

I like this bill. The absurdity lies in putting some of these people on the list in the first place. For the record. If you read your own source you will see that child molesters and rapists cannot get off of the list.

Sing the bill Jerry. The cops are right.

[Hong Wu]

I dunno what I think about this one without more information, I think though after some of the things California has done recently (the HIV thing, fines for man-spreading and possible imprisonment for using the wrong gender pronoun, which is meant to try and create a slippery slope in that area since not many seniors are transgender, to name just a few) it would be pretty normal at this point to assume the worst about this bill until we see how it plays out.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

@Drlee The article makes it unclear whether "tier 3" is still permanent under the new rules in the bill.

Crimes like rape, sex crimes against children 10 and younger, repeated sex crimes and sex trafficking minors, put a sex offender in a third tier that requires them to be on registry for life. That tier has an estimated 8,200 people.

Currently, it's a registry for life. With this bill allowing people from most tiers to get off the list, it hasn't been definitively stated whether that tier 3 is still permanent. The person who wrote the article might have been poor in choosing their words.

Also, people guilty of sexual assault, possession of child porn, and people who have molested children or had sex with children under 14 are stated in the article as being able to get off the list. So, again, the reasoning is just insane.