NPR: Harbor Gateway’s pocket park solution to sex offenders

— CA RSOL’s Janice Bellucci on AirTalk. Audio Feed should be available tomorrow.

The LA neighborhood of Harbor Gateway is building a small pocket park to try and force the area’s 33 registered sex offenders to move away.

Jessica’s Law bans registered sex offenders from living within 2000 feet of a school or park where children regularly gather. Supporters of the park think it’s a novel way to force sex offenders out of the neighborhood but civil rights lawyers are concerned the move will unfairly force sex offenders out of their homes.

Janice Bellucci, an attorney with California Reform Sex Offender Laws, thinks the new park will unconstitutionally banish people from the area; but City Councilman Joe Buscaino said he is willing to do anything in his power to keep sex offenders out of the neighborhood. Web Site

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I felt ambushed in this radio interview. There were three individuals with opposing views and a host who questioned the veracity of the CDCR statistic that only 1.9 percent of sex offenders commit a second sex offense. I was “saved” by several supporters who called in or sent in an E-mail. Thank you!

Janice, do I understand correctly that offenders not on parole do not have to adhere to Jessica’s Law residency requirements? I think that is what you implied in your radio address. If my understanding is correct, this blows me away. I am off of parole and have been fretting about the residency restrictions for years. Since when has the residency restrictions for s.o.’s, off of parole, been lifted? Janice, is it true that in San Diego residency restrictions don’t even apply to people on parole?

The public is funny, they pass laws that severely limit where an s.o. can live, then complain when they concentrate in one neighborhood.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind all readers to contribute as much money as you can to this organization. The more money Janice and her helpers have to work with, the more they can do for us.

…well if you’re “right by her side”, howsabout you email her a thousand bucks…

Janice needs a bomb-shelter.

Building parks to mitigate the threat posed by a forced concentration of sex offenders is one amazing stunt. Amply illustrating the venality of Los Angeles politics, it allows the perpetrator to slice two tomatoes with the same knife; beautify the otherwise despicably filthy neighborhood with a “park” barely large enough to let some street-bum piss on a bush and at the same stroke, strike a blow against the Despised.

What genius.

First we concentrate them into a controllable space, then we make that space uninhabitable. Why don’t they just build a gas chamber? It would be so much more humane. You get your 290 Registrant status and they give you a bus ticket to Los Angeles where you get in line to “take a shower”.

Look, guys…It’s a noble effort and the United States has a long history of patriots fighting for liberty. The most promising development of late is the finding that paedophiles, like homosexuals, may be a discrete sexual subset and not a bunch of dangerous, flaming, perverts.
The interesting thing is that Registered Sex Offenders are, bye and large, not a threat to society. I give you the fourteen-year-old girl who posted nude pictures of herself online and is now facing the prospect of being obliged to register as a “sex offender”. I guess she can’t live near a park, so wherever her family lives, they can’t. So the whole lot of ’em are now camped-out under a freeway somewhere because their daughter has attitude.
Great. Genius. Justice.

With all appreciation for the efforts that Janice puts forth, we need a nuclear weapon and not a musket. We need 20th-Century Marines; a band of Minutemen (dramatic as they may be) just won’t cut the mushroom here. Janice is going to get peeled with a razor-blade and they will pass whatever rules they want in spite.

Constitution, or no constitution, there is no limiting the power of hate. This is why the laws passed to rid the various communities of Registered Sex Offenders are hate-crimes perpetrated by the various communities in the persons of their elected representatives. These ordinances are crimes at the Federal level and demand investigation by the F.B.I as much as other actions by organized crime syndicates.

Deliberate, willful, premeditated violation of the rights of a minority of the citizenry is a Federal Crime. Hate-Crimes are a Federal Offense.

Why are we not demanding protection, instead of tilting these Trojan Horses?

Janice: Go Federal.

How nice that you are embarking on a ‘field trip’. I would hope you are including plenty of security personnel.

Nearly a century after the end of the Civil War, the United States of America nearly went to pieces again over the civil rights of racial minorities, most directly the American Negro living in the deep South, but by inclusion all of us. One particularly egregious State deliberately and exclusively prohibited Colored People from participating in higher education. A squadron of Federal Marshals was dispatched as a result, thus bringing to light the Federal Government’s resolve to enforce the Civil Rights of its’ citizens, unpopular as those individual citizens may be with whatever Podunk community and it’s elected sheriff.

If the housing restrictions in point apply only to parolees, and not to Registered Sex Offenders in general, then the issue is grist for the parole agents and their charges. The issue is absolutely not something over which a local City Council can assume authority, anymore than they can determine specific sentencing requirements and force the courts to comply. It’s a separation of powers issue and pretty well defined in American law.
But if these backwater councils see fit to enact ordinances against various citizens simply because those citizens are included in whatever registry, those councils tread on very thin legally legitimate ice and may very well be not unlike the Mississippi bigots who tried to marginalize people of color simply because they didn’t want racial integration despoiling their white purity.

I was reading the Orange County Register article about these ‘pocket parks’ and that there is an initiative to build 50 parks in the city of L.A. to bring green space to blighted areas. If they continue to strategically build them as a means of restricting and prohibiting where registrants can live, Then I can’t imagine it will be too difficult to get a federal judge to lift the residency restrictions the way they were in San Diego County. It’s just a thought.
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”

I’m dumbfounded? Some cities enforce the residency restrictions and some don’t?

The Nazi used similar techniques to control where certain groups could live. Once that was done they herded them into concentration camps where they could begin their “final solution” to the “problem”.

Seems like this is the way things are progressing for us…how long before we are zoned out of every possible area except the concentration camps they are surly planning for the next phase of their plan for us.

When will this madness stop!

Janice you mentioned that the attorney general said in her brief that the residency restrictions apply only to parolees. How does that square with what you know about residency restrictions in all the counties? Could the attorney general be intentionally misleading the court?

I got released from la county jail yesterday under Ab 109 law, I just completed my violation for not registering the business I worked for the last 2 1/2 yes on parole. They said I did not register my job as a residence . I worked night shift for the while time until my violation until my recent violation. Today I went to the parole building today and they told me to give a address or go sleep in the middle of a desert. I’m in the middle of a dedeer now… I received no gate money for a place to sleep and I have to be in a specific spot while I’m transient , like a curfew… I’m in Lancaster CA…. It’s not in my parole conditions but my parole agent and his supervisor, said if I don’t be there prepare to go to jail tomorrow… I feel like I’m pressed by a hate crime. My crime is pandering a minor, and my file clearly shows I had no participation in the crime, my controlling case is a burglary from 2003, my s.o. Is from Nevada…. I’m willing to be in the front of the cameras and take the hits from the public…. Call me 6615440008 if there’s anything I can do