Information missing on thousands of Georgia sex offenders
Thousands of freed sex offenders listed on a state registry are not classified by the level of risk they pose — despite being required by law — leaving the public with no way of knowing how dangerous they are.
The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board is tasked with gauging whether sex offenders pose almost no risk, are likely to re-offend or are violent predators. But a lack of manpower to do background checks has led to a backlog of more than 6,100 offenders who have yet to be labeled, leaving citizens unable to get an accurate picture of the risks posed by sex offenders living in their neighborhoods.
“It’s a problem,” said Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation which maintains the sex offender registry on the GBI website. “We shouldn’t have unclassified sex offenders. We will never be current under the current practice.”
There are almost 21,100 people on Georgia’s sex offender registry. Nearly 4,200 are still in prison but will soon be released within six months.
But the process of classifying a sex offender is time-consuming and there aren’t enough people. The GBI has eight people, three added in July, who do criminal background checks for the review board’s four analysts.
Meanwhile, a Fulton County judge recently ruled the review board itself is unconstitutional — putting the law itself at risk.
The legal challenges add one more complexity to an already struggling system.
The federal law, also known as the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, required a three-tier classification system the public can access to find out where sexual offenders live.
The state sex offender registry website lists 5,171 as “level one” because they pose little risk to the public. Nearly 2,800 are assigned to “level two” because there is an increased likelihood they will re-offend. And 678 are listed as sexually dangerous predators.
There also are 1,463 offenders who cannot be classified because their crimes occurred before the current law took effect in 2006. (The registry still contains the names of 184 sex offenders who have died but their names have not yet been removed from the list.)