It’s Confirmed: recent “compliance checks” were an “operation”
We have received a spike in comments and contacts from people who have had address verifications, many of which involving multiple jurisdictions over the last two weeks. We suspected it was part of one of these “operations” taking place in certain counties, such as Brevard, Bay and others. You know the ones… Its where they round up a bunch of people, mostly on petty technical violations, and then put out press releases such as the one in Bay County where they announce “Operation Watchdog” arrests 37 people in sex offender sting.
Only these are not, for the most part, new sex offenses. These are mostly technical violations, such as not registering a broken down trailer in a backyard. And for the 29 people who were arrested for a technical violation, such as not registering a trailer, they (as you can see from the below press conference) want “Take this element out of our communities”
Oh and naturally this is a “joint operation” between local, police, the FDLE, the US Marshals, Department of Homeland Security…
In the media it’s called “click bait”, in this case it’s Federal Grant bait.
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Compliance op finds NO reoffending, ‘protects public’:
http://1057news.com/2021/07/15/13/45/33/u-s-marshals-join-cumberland-co-law-enforcement-in-sex-offender-compliance-operation/
To be perfectly clear, I have no sympathy for those who were arrested for “real” sex crimes, particularly if they were registered. Those were just slow learners, and probably need to have the lesson reinforced.
However, this was a typical public relations operation. We must remember that police and prosecutors don’t get “promotion points” for actually stopping crime. They get credit for making arrests and obtaining convictions. Indeed, if the crime rate went to zero, they would be out of their jobs.
The briefing began with the naming of seven agencies involved to make sure that these can include “Operation Watchdog” in the departmental resumes at funding time. A quick look at the numbers is revealing. Of the 38 total arrests, 6 were arrested for traveling, 3 for possession of child pornography, and 29 for technical registry violations. Only one of the travelers was registered, incidentally for the same crime. He’s one of the slow learners. In addition to the 6 traveler arrests, the 3 possession arrests were likely due to what the briefer referred to as the “online operation.”
That leaves the 29 violations of registry laws—although one of those may have been a probation violation. Twenty-nine is 7.25% of the 400 registrants in the area. The lone traveler who was a registrant represents 0.25% of all area registrants. Of the 38 arrests, 9 were for real sex crimes, which is 2.6%.
Note that all 9 real crime arrests could have been obtained without a sweep of registered SOs!! However that would not provide the desired effect of vilifying registrants, nor could it justify the manpower. Since those 9 real crimes were detected through the online portion, they needed to pad the operation with technical violations to obtain the desired public relations benefit. If I am being too cynical or am misinterpreting the data, please let me know.
Veritas.
Sorry 2.6% should have been 23.7%. Rounding error and typo.