Sex offender charge puts focus on registration problem

State police in Gettysburg said today that a registered sex offender wasn't living at the Littlestown address he'd given authorities, so police charged him with failing to meet sexual offender registration requirements.

That hits on a problem area with Megan's Law that we've written about:

•  Offenders are required to tell authorities where they live, but the state police have said they usually investigate only if they get a tip or if an offender doesn't register on the anniversary of the conviction date. A 2007 story by staffer Rick Lee reported that up to 10 percent of convicted sex offenders don't follow registration guidelines.
  
• And, a recent court ruling held that homeless sex offenders can't be convicted if they don't register an address with police. In July, a three-judge panel from the Pennsylvania Superior Court suggested the legislature ought to look at that loophole.

 You can look up registered sex offenders' information on the state's Megan's Law Web site, but the registration-requirement problems mean you might not be getting accurate information.

 For example, in today's news release, state police said that 27-year-old Christopher Lee Coleman (pictured above), whose registered address was 145 W. King St. in Littlestown, wasn't living there. How long was he living elsewhere? The news release doesn't say. But the point is, for some period of time, he wasn't where the Web site said he was, or where police thought he was.

 The question is what to do about it. Some have suggested GPS monitoring, or that police should physically verify every offender's registered address. But GPS might not work perfectly, and there's a question about whether police have the manpower to check each address.

Meanwhile, authorities urge people to be vigilant in their own neighborhoods. Even with the problems in Pennsylvania, at least people have some information to go on. In Canada earlier this year, there was a movement to open sex offender information to the public instead of making it available only to police.

*Update to original post: @regularguy on Twitter wondered whether the Jaycee Dugard case would make agencies take a closer at such laws. We'll look into what might be happening here. Meanwhile, here are the Google News search results for "Dugard Megan's law" if you're interested.