Fort Lauderdale city commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to relax the city’s residency restrictions on sex offenders.
Offenders will now be allowed to live close to bus stops but they are still barred from living within 1,400 feet of a school, daycare and other places children gather.
The change will expand the available housing for convicted offenders from 1.4% of the city to 15.3%. It also brings Fort Lauderdale more in line with Florida state law.
Dr. Amy Miller praised the ordinance as “an absolutely phenomenal step,” to change a “really grim” situation. Miller is the clinical director at OBMAR Counseling, a Fort Lauderdale organization that serves as an approved provider for sex offender treatment.
Harsh restrictions regarding where sex offenders live can cause them to become and remain homeless, Miller said. That can threaten their overall stability and jeopardize their treatment.
Off paper I will live wherever I want. Enter my property, break my door down and arrest me. Try your best not to harm my wife and children. See you in court.
He voiced his approval for the compromise, which changed the statute without making “folks in our community feel like they are at risk of encountering sexual predators.”
These people are idiots. They encounter sex offenders everytime they leave the house. The gas station, stores, the theater, work, etc. It never surprises me how stupid people are……..
They are idiots. In fact, nearly ALL “people” who support the Registries are so freaking stupid that it literally hurts my brain to interact, hear, or see them. They are a danger to intelligence and productivity everywhere.
They are even so damn stupid that they don’t understand that they could literally imprison every single person who has ever committed a $EX crime and it would not change their risk level in any significant or CERTAINLY useful way. They’d still be encountering “$EXUAL predators”.
I honestly don’t see how any decent American can think these residency “restrictions” are acceptable. It’s outrageous. I’d love to see these people that were made homeless start hunting Registry Supporters in their homes. I am really surprised that type of stuff has not happened more. I certainly wouldn’t sit back and do nothing. If they called me a monster and said I couldn’t live anywhere, they’d find out what kind of monster they created.
And we should never stop pointing out that SUPPOSEDLY the idiots who like these “restrictions” are just fine with people who have shot children with guns living right next to schools, parks, or wherever children congregate. They are just fine with shooters being in schools. What a massive failure! That alone proves what this nonsense is really about.
I’ve often called the Registry stupidity the “‘Sex Offender’ Witch Hunt”. But that’s too tame. Which is more accurate?:
“Sex Offender” Apartheid
“Sex Offender” War
Yes, I read that line and wanted to comment but I just had no words to convey.
They past new ordinance to restrict sex offenders, only to later revoke it and call it “good news” to the media. Then, to make up for the lost ordinance they struck down, they write some new ordinance that is equally harsh; then to strike it down and shout “good news.” The song and dance continues, each time giving false hope to registrant readers that things are somehow getting better.
It hasnt gotten much better. These “relaxings” of bufferzones are not progress; since new buffer restrictions will later arise, in Florida and elsewhere. All the while, nothing is “relaxing” the status of illegality on certain things that, in the right minds of humans, either shouldn’t be a crime altogether or shouldn’t be considered the level of severe crime that all sex crimes are narrowly categorized. (Fixing THIS is, as I believe, where real “relaxation” would happen.) State and local governments will still continue to find ways to harshly and irrationally punish/oppress/supress SO’s, and social communities will continue to ostracize and marginalize them.
Many registrants are not feeling “relaxed” even after this article, as no circuit court has done anything significant to ease our minds from the experience of hate the government has legally (and socially) caused.