Convicted sex offender John Couey was supposed to be living two miles away from the home of the nine-year old girl he allegedly kidnapped, raped and murdered.  That's where he was registered in a sex offender database, at least.  But, unbeknownst to law enforcement, Couey frequently stayed with a relative who lived just yards from Jessica Lunsford's house, giving him a prime opportunity to prey on the young girl.

In a world where there are so many sex offenders being released back into the community, knowing where they are living and what they are up to is a priority for law enforcement officials, who must answer to the public when they lose track of some of society's most dangerous criminals.

While the Bush administration is pushing for the creation of a national sex offender registry to make information about this population more accurate and widely available, some local law enforcement agencies in San Diego County are making a smaller-scale effort, with a similar goal in mind.

The San Diego Regional Sex Offender Management System (SDROMS) is currently in development in Southern California.  Upon completion of the three-phase project, county law enforcement and criminal justice agencies will be more closely aligned so they can share information about the sex offenders that are living in their communities.

"It's critical to make sure that one of these guys or gals doesn't slip through the cracks," said SDROMS Project Manager Kirby Beyer, a lieutenant with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.

While Beyer anticipates that the first phase of SDROMS will be rolled out by early next year, the build up to the implementation of the system has been in the works for years.

Program Development

San Diego County began to focus on improving its sex offender management procedures in 1999, when a grant from the Office of Justice Programs enabled the county to perform an 18-month review of its approach to registering and managing sex offenders. 

During that analysis, the county identified several areas for improvement, including in its information collection and sharing practices, said Margaret Bullens, the former director of San Diego's Sex Offender Management Council (SOMC). 

Bullens, who left her post last month at the SOMC to take over as National Director of Research and Reform for the Boston-based ALLY Foundation, said that the types of information being collected from sex offenders when they registered varied from agency to agency and, once that data had been stored in one agency's system, it was not readily available to others.

"There was not a regional plan for capturing the same information," said Bullens.  "We wanted to improve upon existing practices.  There were certainly needs around information sharing [and] around the depth of information being collected."

In response to those needs, the county put the wheels in motion for the development of a new IT system - the SDROMS, which will enhance communication between key sex offender management players in the county.  So far, this creation of this comprehensive new system has required involvement from several different vendors and an extensive amount of research.

"It's an enormous project," said Bullens.  "It was more than just creating a system that had different people's input," she said.  "[It was] trying to come up with an approach and a single IT system that could be integrated into all of the different law enforcement agencies [and] would have an infrastructure that would support enhancements down the road and would meet everyone's needs."

According to Beyer, the first step in creating SDROMS, which was crucial, was getting everyone who would be impacted by the project on board with its mission.  He said all of the chiefs of the various county law enforcement agencies were consulted, so they could all agree upon the concept of SDROMS.

"Getting buy-in from the top is really important," said Beyer.  "You have to have that so [that], as you move forward, you've got the right base of support."

After pitching the project to key officials and obtaining their approval, the next vital step was sitting down and talking with the law enforcement personnel who are actually responsible for collecting data from the sex offenders and keeping track of them, Beyer said.

"[We] had to get down to the workers that do the registration and monitoring of sex offenders and spend time talking about how are they doing business today," said Beyer.  "Then we looked at what would we need to do to make things better."

From years of roundtable discussions about these issues, the county was able to come up with a three-ring binder full of system requirements, for how SDROMS should run and what its technical components should be. 

With requirements in place to guide the system's development, the first of the three phases is scheduled for implementation in coming months.

According to Bullens, Phase I of the project will link San Diego County law enforcement agencies to the same system, which will enable them to register sex offenders, produce reports, make queries, send alerts and notifications and push data out to other, external systems, like the statewide database. 

Phase II, Bullens said, will add mug shots, allowing agencies to upload images to the system.  The query module will also be expanded at this point, she said.

When Phase III is implemented, the SDROMS will serve a case management function, Bullens explained.  At that point, probation and parole personnel, treatment providers and polygraph examiners will be able to add and view information in the system, she said. 

"Phase III expands the system itself from a law enforcement database to a system-partner case management system," Bullens said.  "As a probation officer, you would have the capability to access the system remotely [through the Internet], go in, and look at information about offenders on your caseload."

SDROMS on the Streets

Another feature of the system will be an ability for users, like probation officers or polygraph examiners, to send alerts to law enforcement agents on the street.

It's important for officers working out in the community to know if the offenders have been flagged by probation for any problems, said Beyer.

"Cops on the street, if they know that, can be much more diligent and effective in dealing with these guys when they encounter them on the streets," Beyer said.

According to Beyer, one of the goals of the SDROMS is to prevent the people who are taking information from sex offenders from duplicating their efforts.  Presently, he said, agencies have their own sex offender management system that they enter data into, a regional system and a statewide system. 

"One of our key thoughts was [that] we wanted a single point of entry [for the information]," said Beyer. 

He explained that after the information has been entered into the SDROMS once, there will be a behind the scenes, automatic transfer of information to all the other places it needs to go. 

"That is probably the largest bonus that the system will bring [for the agencies] besides the increased communication and data sharing," said Beyer.

But the enhanced communication between law enforcement agencies in San Diego County about the whereabouts of sex offenders will benefit the public, too, Beyer said.

"That information, as it's more accessible and available to the public, certainly increases their confidence that we know where these people are and we can keep track of them," he said.

Resources:

SDOMC www.sdsomc.com

Bullens Margaret@theallyfoundation.org

Beyer Kirby.beyer@sdsheriff.org