January 28, Chicago, Il
About 190 Chicago sex offenders who were violating state reporting requirements were tracked down and accounted for during an eight-week operation intended to send a message to the city's noncompliant individuals, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
Of those who were located, 40 were arrested for violating the Illinois Sex Offender Registration Act, which requires them to take specific actions such as registering their address within three days of being released from prison or changing residences.
"The message to noncompliant sex offenders is that if you fail to register, we will find you and we will prosecute you," said Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who was joined at a news conference Thursday by Chicago police Superintendent Jody Weis and John O'Malley, chief deputy of the U.S. marshals' Chicago office.
But nearly half of the 192 sex offenders who were accounted for were found to already be in custody on other charges. Officials acknowledged that lack of communication between agencies was a problem.
"That's something that we need to get better on," O'Malley said.
The remainder of the individuals located by the task force were either helped to get back into compliance, had been deported, had died or were out of state, officials said.
With hundreds of noncompliant sex offenders still unaccounted for in Chicago, O'Malley and other officials stressed that more still needed to be done to address the problem.
"We're never going to get to the point where every sex offender is in compliance 100 percent," O'Malley said.
Still, you would think that perhaps there would be enough updating that these agencies would know when an offender died or was in custody of the same law enforcement groups that were looking for them right?
No comments:
Post a Comment