Ahead of the Santa Clarita City Council’s scheduled discussion Tuesday on whether to adjust its residency restrictions for registered sex offenders, The Signal compiled a map of the address-specific registrants from California’s Megan’s Law website.
At the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station, several individuals work to maintain the list, based on statutory requirements set up for sex offenders by state law.
There’s a sex registrant coordinator who oversees the list, “and we have two detectives who also work with that to monitor violations,” according to Lt. Ignacio Somoano of the SCV Sheriff’s Station.
The website set up as a result of Megan’s Law “provides information on registered sex offenders pursuant to California Penal Code 290.46 so that members of the public can better protect themselves and their families,” according to meganslaw.ca.gov.
The site culls information from the California Sex and Arson Registry, or CSAR, and the map attached to this article was created by pulling information from the Megan’s Law website.
The map attached is by no means a complete list of the sex offenders who live in the Santa Clarita Valley. Not every sex offender’s complete address is publishable, and for certain offenses, only the sex offender’s ZIP code is publicly available. Those offenders are not listed on the map; however, if you’d like to look up additional information online, the complete list of sex offenders by ZIP code is available at the Megan’s Law website.
“When a sex offender is released into the community, he or she must register within five working days at the law enforcement agency having jurisdiction over his or her residence,” according to the Megan’s Law website. “Registered sex offenders are required to update their information annually with local law enforcement, within five working days before or after their birthday. Some sex offenders must update their information more often: transients must update every 30 days and sexually violent predators must update every 90 days. The California Sex Offender Registry keeps track of the next required update, and if a registered sex offender is in violation of the update requirements, this website will show the registrant as being in violation.”
The upcoming discussion at Santa Clarita City Hall set for the City Council’s next meeting has to do with a city staff recommendation to lessen the city’s current restrictions on where a sex offender can live, which is aimed at addressing pending litigation and a state Supreme Court ruling.
Any registered sex offender is prohibited from residing within 2,000 feet of a school, park, library or child care center in Santa Clarita, under the city’s current ordinance. The measure also prohibits sex offenders from living with each other in the same residence or unit of a multi-unit building.
From a previous report: City Council to consider repealing sex offender residency restrictions
The civil case challenged Santa Clarita’s distance, density and concentration restrictions for sex offenders based on the California Supreme Court “In Re Taylor” decision in March 2015, which struck down residency restrictions for those on the sex offender registry after ruling that Proposition 83 was unconstitutional.
The proposition, titled the Sexual Predator Punishment and Control Act, is also known as Jessica’s Law, which voters approved in 2006. The law is well-known for requiring registered sex offenders to be monitored by GPS devices while on parole and for the rest of their lives with the intent to better protect the public, including children.
Reports such as the 2011 “Homeless Among California’s Sex Offenders” by the California Sex Offender Management Board concluded that these restrictions don’t prevent crimes against children, but rather they increase the likelihood of re-offense as offenders are left with little to no housing options and fall into homelessness.
Janice Bellucci, a civil rights attorney who has sued 34 other cities since 2015 for failing to repeal their ordinances, said she and her team have been looking at the areas in Santa Clarita where registrants cannot live under the current ordinance.
“There’s at least 50, K-12 schools, three public libraries and more than 30 parks with a 2,000-foot distance limit,” she said. “That means most of Santa Clarita is off limits. (The ordinance) breaks up families and can end up breaking or sending people far away (because) it’s not just Santa Clarita, it’s other cities in Los Angeles County.”
Belluci said Santa Clarita was given three years to repeal its ordinance via a letter her office sent out, “but they didn’t. Sometimes it takes a lawsuit to get a city’s attention.”
She added that other cities have since repealed their ordinances’ sex offender residency restrictions and she hopes Santa Clarita will, too. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department no longer enforces residency restriction limitations during the parole period, but may on a case-by-case basis.
If the city repeals the residency restrictions, the lawsuit will be dismissed, said Bellucci.
Tammy Murga contributed to this report.
