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Sheriff to send alerts on sex offendersTue, 09/08/2009 - 4:35pm
By: John Munford
Get email notice when offender moves within a mile of your home Fayette residents now can sign up to receive an email alert any time a registered sex offender moves within a mile of their homes. The new web-based service is offered by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, which also has the names, address, mug shots and other data on all sex offenders currently registered in Fayette County. The website also has a way for users to send an email link about a particular sex offender, which will allow neighbors to share information with each other, officials said. The site is available via a boxed link at www.fayettecountyga.gov/sheriff. After clicking on that box, the next webpage has a box near the top to click which triggers the email registration process. Citizens will be cued to enter their address, but they can enter multiple addresses if there are different areas they are interested in tracking sex offenders in. For example, a user may want to track their neighborhood and also their parents’ neighborhood, said Fayette County Sheriff Wayne Hannah. The sex offender website also allows users to search a two-mile radius of any given address. The results come back in a map format, with each sex offender’s name listed on the far right. From that page, a user can click each name for further details on the sex offender. The search also allows citizens to search by a sex offender’s first and/or last name. There’s also a link to call up a listing of each sex offender registered in Fayette County. The website also includes tips for parents including suspicious activity they should be watchful of which might indicate a child has been victimized. Sheriff’s officials are also undertaking a more aggressive effort to keep track of sex offenders. By law, they are only required to register their information with the sheriff’s office within 72 hours of moving here. The email alerts will be sent to registered users within 24 hours of the offender registering at the sheriff’s office, officials said. Deputies and detectives are also conducting periodic “drive-by” checks to confirm the sex offender still lives at a certain address, Hannah said. To avoid harassing registered sex offenders, most of those drive-bys will not involve any contact, but if the offender is outside, a report will be generated to update the offender’s status, Hannah said. The information for the department’s webpage comes from a more detailed database of details kept on each sex offender that moves to Fayette County, said Det. Josh Shelton. Those details include the model and color of car they drive, so when an incident occurs, they can key in the respective data and find out if any sex offenders drive a certain type of car, Shelton said. The database also keeps track of identifying marks such as tattoos and a host of other details. “It’s a very powerful tool for law enforcement,” Hannah said. The database also makes it easy to track whether or not a sex offenders’ new address meets state law of being 1,000 feet away from any school, church or other area where children congregate such as playgrounds, libraries and the like, Shelton said. login to post comments
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