Officers to make visits to homes of offenders

The Bexar County Adult Probation Department said it will go door to door to check on registered sex offenders on Halloween instead of its usual in-person supervised group meeting.

For the past 10 years, the department’s Project S.A.F.E. Halloween has supervised sex offenders in person on Halloween night to talk about registration obligations, new rules and treatment-related issues. This not only helps the community feel safe while children are trick-or-treating but also helps keep the offenders out of trouble, said Shannon Jones, supervisor for the Sexual Offenders Management Unit.

Because of the pandemic, the department was forced to change its plans. Jones said there was no safe way for it to host the meeting today, so the department will be visiting offenders at their homes.

The department is currently supervising 600 registered sex offenders.

“This isn’t something that can go virtual because the offenders can’t be online without supervision,” Jones said. “Throughout the year, we still do our field visits, so we just had to make this work. This year, we had to go old school.”

The department hasn’t gone door to door on Halloween night in more than 10 years, a practice that Jones says takes up too many police resources and doesn’t provide the important resources offenders receive in person.

“It was a challenge because we didn’t want to do it the same way as we used to, where officers would show up once to check and never go again that night,” Jones said. “That’s not effective, so we will have our teams going out and coming back again multiple times throughout the night.”

Jones said she hopes the pandemic will be an advantage because parents will likely be more cautious this year about taking their children trick-or-treating.

“Our priority is still to protect the community, and this year we will still be able to do that effectively,” Jones said. “And likely, if the offenders have the lights off at their homes and are doing what they need to be doing, parents probably aren’t going to have their kids go to those houses.”

But, like every year, Jones said the community is no less safe on Halloween night than any other night of the year.