Quoted from bumblethru

The clock is ticking. This present government will bide their time, knowing they did not give the 'committee' enough time to research and voice their opinions. Although the committee is clearly stacked in their favor. The law will stand as it is....I'll bet the farm on that one.

And when this great dysfunctional elected body, votes this into law, they will say that there was no input from the opposition. It was just a pre-planned set up!

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
   SEX OFFENDERS

   In case you’re wondering how the 29-member task force is doing that was created by the Schenectady County Legislature to make recommendations on sex-offender laws, after the Legislature itself stepped in a big cow pie over the issue, I can tell you it’s doing about as well as its parent body.
   It started off on Friday with a meeting at the county library that was not announced to the public and was therefore illegal, and the members droned and rambled aimlessly for an hour, the dominant voice being that of a soft-spoken Scotia resident who is the most fanatical on the subject of sex offenders, while assorted probation officers, politicians and bureaucrats basically listened.
   Listened to what? To the proposition that we don’t want sex offenders in our community. Mixed in with some reports on how things are done now.
   The legislature gave this task force 90 days from Aug. 23 to come up with recommendations on as many as 14 possible local laws to deal with the danger, largely imaginary, posed by those who were once convicted of sex offenses.
   At the rate they’re going, I don’t see how they can accomplish their objective in less than 90 years.

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Schenectady’s imaginary predators
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

   So the Schenectady County Legislature is backing down. The majority Democrats have decided to forgo the banishment of registered sex offenders and to exempt the lowest level of offenders altogether. I refer to the law — actually, two separate laws — that were to bar anyone on the state Sex Offender Registry from moving into any area within 2,000 feet of a school, playground, daycare center or public swimming pool (the first law) and then to evict such people who already lived there (the second law). Both laws made no distinction as to level of offense.
   They will apparently keep the restriction on the more serious levels of offenders moving into restricted areas, which many other municipalities also have passed in the current panic over sex offenders, but the banishment will be repealed — just as the New York Civil Liberties Union announced it was going to sue.
   Very well. Given what the Legislature went through to obtain this drastic law, which had the stated purpose of protecting children from predators, wouldn’t you suppose that sex crimes against children by registered offenders must be quite a serious problem in Schenectady? I mean, for the local legislature to have gone to such lengths.
   Wouldn’t you suppose there must have been quite a few cases in recent years of children being molested by registered offenders?
   Well, if you did suppose such a thing, that is, if you supposed that the legislators were responding to an actual problem rather than just opportunistically riding a wave of popular hysteria, you would be grievously mistaken.
   I have checked into the matter, which admittedly I should have done earlier, and here is what I learned from no less an authority than Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney and his assistant for sex-crime prosecution, Andra Ackerman: In the past two years the district attorney’s office has processed 113 sex-crime defendants, and of those a mere six were registered offenders repeating their crimes. Further, of those six repeaters, only two were charged with offenses against children, and of those two, neither was accused as a stranger. They were both some kind of family members or acquaintances.
   In other words in the past two years there has not been a single case of what the legislators (and many others) want us to believe is a tremendous social problem — serial “predators” skulking around schools and playgrounds waiting to snatch away our innocent children for their perverted gratification.
   Not a single case. So the panic is even more crackpot than I thought, or more cynical.
   When I recall the oratory that washed over me on the evening of June 12 when the legislators voted on their banishment bill and how they justified it with the supposedly out-of-control recidivism rate of sexual predators — without ever having checked with their own district attorney — it makes my head ache now.
   I close my eyes and I can see them flourishing their tape measures and I can hear them pledging their sacred honor, and I reflect that it was all just sort of hypothetical, or imaginary, and, yes, the blood pounds in my temples.
   Too bad we probably won’t get to hear the proposed banishment argued in court.
   In a four-page letter just sent to the county’s legislators, the Civil Liberties Union said the two local laws violate a rule against “exercising authority in a manner that is inconsistent with overriding state law and policy,” and also that it’s “clearly unconstitutional to evict law-abiding citizens from their homes, and effectively banish them from the entire county, based on an ex post facto law, which increases the punishment for the original crime after it is committed.”
   The lawyers who signed up to pursue this matter for the Civil Liberties Union are Terry Kindlon of Albany; an associate of his, Kathy Manley; and David Giacalone, a retired lawyer from the city of Schenectady.
   I would have liked to hear the arguments and heard the decision.
READING DISORDER
As for the letter in yesterday’s newspaper from a self-described therapist declaring, “Mr. Strock is again mistaken. Child molesters have always existed,” my diagnosis is that the writer has Basic Reading Disorder, since of course I never said that child molesters don’t exist. I just gave what I perceive as the history of the recent hysteria.
   Of course child molesters exist, and I suppose they always have, but the vast exaggeration of the danger they pose is a recent phenomenon. Mostly they molest children who are close to them, like family members, friends or neighbors, while the kind of creature we all dread, the monster who lurks behind bushes waiting to rape and murder our children, is a great rarity, which you can look up for yourself.
   She says I have a “prejudiced and unrealistic view.” But what’s prejudiced and unrealistic about that? I think it’s entirely accurate.
   She says I should “wise up,” that “this is a crime and illness which is never cured but managed.”
   I don’t know what kind of therapist she is, since she didn’t return my phone call, but she must not have attended the conference last year at the Glen Sanders Mansion of a couple hundred people who deal with sex offenders every day, and she must not have listened to Ken Lau, president of the state chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, or she wouldn’t say such foolish and ignorant things.
   Oh, the abuse I take in my job. There ought to be a law.