Cops Kill Man Breaking into Sex Offender’s Home
“Police shot and killed a knife-wielding man attempting to break into the home of a registered sex offender who police warned neighbors might still be abusing children. Authorities on Monday defended their decision to circulate a flier in a Bakersfield neighborhood identifying Vincent Verdile as a registered sex offender even though the information was ‘completely unsubstantiated…’ On Saturday, police shot and killed Gabriel Angel Garcia, who was attempting to kick in Verdile’s front door. Police had not yet established a motive for why Garcia, a 20-year-old neighbor of Verdile, was trying to break into the man’s home. But several weeks ago, Bakersfield police circulated a flier around Verdile’s neighborhood with a picture of Verdile on it and listing his height, weight, hair color and race under a banner that read, ‘Serious Sex Offender…’” — Mercury News (US)
The important thing to distinguish here is the attacker’s motive. If he was breaking into a house that just happened to belong to a registered sex offender, it’s one thing. If he had seen the police fliers denouncing the sex offender and was breaking into the house to attack the man, it’s another thing.
Unfortunately, there has as yet been no definitive statement about the attacker’s motive. One newspaper report claimed that the attacker had been speaking to children in the neighborhood, and then marched over to the sex offender’s house. Another report claimed that the attacker had marijuana, PCP, and methamphetamine in his system — a potent brew. And this same report indicates that local officials found that the police were fully justified shooting the man, who refused to relinquish his weapon.
When you put the stories together you get the sense that the attacker, hepped up on drugs, decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against the sex offender down the street. Or was it a punitive strike for past acts? Either way, the attacker was taking justice into his own hands — and it demonstrates the real danger of sex offender registries. Although these registries have the noble purpose of preventing sex crimes, at the same time they make private citizens vulnerable to acts of vigilantism. After all, if you could look up the address of some creep who raped your ten-year-old daughter, wouldn’t you go beat the shit out of him?
It’s especially disconcerting in this case, where the police took it upon themselves to plaster the neighborhood with fliers denouncing the presence of the sex criminal. On one hand it was probably the correct thing to do, since sex offenders tend not to be reformed by the relatively nominal amounts of time they serve in jail. On the other hand, is it just to presume that sex offenders are always a clear and present danger to their communities? If it’s not just — or if it’s just cynical — then the police have no business “outing” people like that. It runs counter to the fundamental principle of “innocent before proven guilty.”
Offender registries and public notification are good. They should be extended beyond prostitutes, johns and sex offenders to all crime types. Forewarned is forearmed. Who wants to be conned, mugged or murdered? Unfortunately we all are accustomed to the idea that however ghastly a predator’s act, he’ll be back, so the more eyes on such scum, the safer will be our lives and those we love.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rsorp94.htm
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/rsorp94.txt
Recidivism studies typically find that, the older the prisoner when
released, the lower the rate of recidivism. Results reported here
on released sex offenders did not follow the familiar pattern. While
the lowest rate of rearrest for a sex crime (3.3%) did belong to the
oldest sex offenders (those age 45 or older), other comparisons
between older and younger prisoners did not consistently show older
prisoners’ having the lower rearrest rate.
Registering our disapproval
It is impossible to open the papers at the moment without noticing that they are even more full than usual of horrific accounts of sexual offences against children. In recent weeks, we have had the convicted sex offender who escaped while on a day trip to Chessington Zoo, the schoolgirl murdered in her dormitory while on holiday in France and the reports of the trial of Howard Hughes, accused of murdering Sophie Hook. This media interest has coincided with the publication of the Home Office Green Paper, “Sentencing and Supervision of Sex Offenders”. This document also makes for horrific reading. The aim of the proposals is to compile a register of convicted sex offenders. Anyone on the register would have severe limitations placed on their subsequent freedom of action, including a requirement that they notify the police of any change in their address, a prohibition on attempts to gain employment involving access to children, a restriction on the access of individuals accused of sexual offences to the victim statements and photographs which make up the case against them, forcible DNA sampling of sex offenders and supervision of sex offenders following their release. All these constraints are placed on sex offenders interminably.
These proposals undermine basic rights and freedoms. They encroach upon the freedom of movement of sex offenders and upon their right to know the case against them. More fundamentally, they are inimical to the basic principle of justice that people are tried and punished for a particular offence, and that once they have paid for their crime with a period of incarceration, they are accepted back into normal society on the same terms as other citizens. These proposals remove any possibility of a punishment being spent. Their significance is that they mark a shift from policing offences to policing a type of person: the object of the criminal justice system is no longer the sexual offence but the sexual offender.
The importance of this shift is that it rejects the notion that people can and do change, that yesterday’s criminal is tomorrow’s law-abiding citizen, and vice versa. However, according to the Green Paper, this proposition does not hold good for sex offenders because “men convicted of sexual offences as adults will often describe a history of (mainly undetected) sexual offending which began in childhood or adolescence and which involved an escalation to more and more serious offences; once a pattern of repeated sex offending is established, the risk of re-offending persists over many years, perhaps for life” (p 2). No evidence is produced by the Green Paper in support of these assertions. In fact, the research disproves each one.
Nobody can establish the number of crimes of any nature which go undetected, and this “hidden crime” argument is always trotted out in support of the latest panic about crime. However the assertion that sex offenders have a history of sexual offences is found to be based on the assumption that sex offenders underestimate the number of offences which they have committed: it is as least as plausible that they exaggerate in order to emphasise their prowess. This hypothesis is supported by the evidence, which shows that the vast majority of sex offenders admit to no more than one sex offence, while a tiny majority claim a huge number (Abel et al 1987): this sounds more like a handful of braggers than widespread recidivism.
The evidence does not support the assertion that sex offenders work their way up the scale of offences against children (Canter and Kirby 1995). Indeed, those who did reoffend tended to stick to the same type of activity (King 1996). Finally, and most importantly, the evidence does not support the Green Paper’s assertions about the recidivist nature of sex offenders. Sex offenders have a lower rate of recidivism than criminals generally (Adamson 1996) and only 10% of sexual offences against children were committed by people with a previous conviction for a sexual offence against a child (King 1996). In effect, therefore, the overwhelming majority of people convicted of sexual offences (90%) cannot be shown to reoffend.
The assumptions in the Green Paper are groundless. More fundamentally however, the Green Paper’s attempt to regulate a type of person, the sex offender, rather than to police particular sexual offences, is fundamentally flawed. Although we may have a strong image of a sex offender as a socially inadequate misfit, Canter and Kirby found that sexual offending against children did not equate with social ineptness, that the sex offender was far more likely to be married with children of his own, and to fit in. Interestingly, they also found that where child molesters did have previous convictions, these convictions were more likely to be for theft or burglary than for previous sexual offences against children. Our image of the local pervert is more likely to be based on the fact that he doesn’t wash and scratches himself in public than that he is actually a risk to children.
On a broader level, this research provides support for the view that people change. The most common explanation for the sex offender these days is that he is trapped in a “cycle of abuse”: because he was the victim of abuse as children, he is now the perpetrator. Although it is true that people are formed by their experiences, they are not fixed by these circumstances: they are constantly made and remade by their changing experiences: we recreate ourselves every day of our lives and adapt to the different situations in which we find ourselves. It is true to say that the boy who commits a sexual offence at the age of seventeen is no longer in existence when he comes out of prison aged twenty one: he is a different person.
Not only are we not fixed by our experiences but we are not determined by them: we decide how to react to our experiences. The majority of people who are the victims of sexual offences as children do not grow up to become sex offenders. Whatever may have happened in a sex offender’s childhood, as a conscious adult he makes a choice when he commits a sexual offence, for which he deserves to be punished. Ironically therefore these proposals, while removing the rights of sex offenders, ultimately allow them to evade responsibility for their offending, for if there is a type of social inadequate who is programmed to continue committing sex offences whatever punishment or treatment is meted out, then ultimately it is not his fault.
These proposals contribute to a culture in which all of us, not just sex offenders, are positively encouraged to evade responsibility for our actions. Watch any episode of Oprah Winfrey or Vanessa, and you will see people wheeled out to explain how they cannot help themselves, how they are the victims of anorexia or compulsive shopping because of their childhood experiences. The label which accompanies these specimens, for example, “woman who cannot trust men since her first boyfriend cheated on her” underlines the point that we are deemed incapable of controlling our destiny, that we are not the products, but rather the victims, of our circumstances. The difference between Oprah’s chat show and Michael Howard’s Green Paper is simply that while the former provides us with excuses for our actions, when Michael Howard substitutes himself for Oprah Winfrey, he actually codifies these excuses in law.
Although an abdication of responsibility for our actions has struck all of us as attractive on occasions, it denies us the capacity to change, and the possibility of learning from the past. The thinking behind the Green Paper condemns us all to repeat our mistakes ad infinitum. It is this capacity for conscious change, for conscious adaptation to new circumstances and for learning from the past which sets humanity apart from all other animals. Ultimately it is only if we accept that we can and do change ourselves according to our circumstances that we have any hope of realising that we can actually change the circumstances themselves.
James Heartfield
All comments become the property of PervScan. You must use an email address to post a comment. However, PervScan disallows email addresses in the text of comments.
Barely Legal