Rep. Plakon Sponsored HB 45, But She Totally Missed the Real Threat Hiding in Seminole County
Florida Representative Rachel Plakon of Seminole County, just handed our state another example of policy making that looks tough but does nothing to keep kids safe.
Rep. Plakon was the sponsor of House Bill 45 that expanded residency restrictions to include public swimming pools for people on the sex offender registry and restricting their school access. She sponsored the bill because someone in Seminole with a past offense having nothing to do with public swimming pools or schools, simply moved into the County. Yesterday, the bill was signed into law. But while lawmakers were busy tightening restrictions on people long after their convictions, a far more predictable and dangerous threat was unfolding right under her nose! A teacher with Seminole County Public Schools (the County Rep. Plakon represents) allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old student.
That’s not an outlier. That’s the pattern. Dozens of people told her so, showed up in Tallahassee to testify before committees, provided research, sent in letters, and called her office. But she didn’t want to accept the facts.
The uncomfortable truth backed by decades of research is that most sexual abuse is committed not by strangers lurking near parks or pools, but by someone the victim knows and trusts: a family member, a coach, or yes, a teacher. HB 45 did nothing to address that reality. It wouldn’t have prevented this assault. It doesn’t even try. Instead, laws like this continue to pour millions of taxpayer dollars into policies built on fear, not evidence – public registries, residency restrictions, and geographic banishment that have repeatedly failed to demonstrate meaningful impact on preventing new offenses. These measures may be politically convenient, but they are useless when it comes to stopping abuse.
What’s worse is the opportunity cost. Every dollar spent monitoring where someone lives decades after their offense is a dollar not spent on prevention, education programs for children, training for parents and teachers, early intervention systems, and resources that actually reduce victimization. While everyone is so hyper-focused in the wrong direction and fooled by this false sense of security, they are distracted from where focus and attention needs to be.
Rep. Plakon and every other lawmaker who supported this bill chose optics over outcomes. They focused on the easiest target, not the most likely threat. And in doing so, they ignored the very environment where abuse is statistically most likely to occur. Until lawmakers are willing to confront the data, abandon ineffective policies, and invest in real prevention, these tragedies will continue. And when they do, the responsibility won’t lie with the system they refused to fix. It will lie with the people who chose not to.
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Georgia added swimming pools to their list of restricted places (in terms of residence, employment, or presence) a long time ago. Yet no one can point to one single sex crime that occurred at or because of one.
I don’t know if her seat is up for reelection this year or not. If so, that likely has more to do with Plakon writing this bill than anything else.
I just hope that everyone continues to be very nice and respectful to Florida Representative Rachel Plakon of Seminole County, other politicians, and other harassing terrorists. That is how you treat bullies. By placating them and playing nice with them. One day they will all become humans.
What is sad, what the U.S does, many times other countries copy. I do not know how many but in the past FAC had mentioned a few countries that were considering or had already implemented a registry of their own.
And I remember my last vacation out of the country while on the registry, the countries I traveled to treated me like I was a king. When I returned home, I missed my connecting flight due to an extended interrogation by U.S TSA agents. They also searched all my bags and could not get into one so they cut it open with a knife, instead of asking me for the key. (Done on purpose)
After that I never flew again but am glad before it got worse, I was able to visit 9 different countries. Now days, I rarely drive farther than 15 miles from my house. Florida has 67 counties, and some of them, you do not want to get pulled over by law enforcement, regardless if it is city cops or the Sheriffs department. I can tell you that from experience and thought I was a goner but by the grace of God, the FDLE sided with me that I had done nothing wrong and was finally able to go on my way. (After a 45 minute detainment)
I hate to say this but it sounds from the details that the victim may have been a willing participant in the relationship.
Morse code???? What rapist uses Morse code to communicate with their victim?
No amount of laws are going to prevent something that apparently neither person wanted stopped. Perhaps more abuse prevention education may have helped the girl make better choices about who she should be involved with, but as they say, their brains are not fully developed yet, so who knows how much it would have helped.
End result: One less teacher, one more victim, and one more sex offender in prison and on the registry. Maybe we would be better off having robots teach children in school.
It happens in all 50 regards of laws in general that is supposed stop sex offense from happening which it won’t do. All it causes is fear and vigilantism instead of preventing crime. Reactive laws work best since the case of them preventing crime they create it.
They chose the political cred they need to be re-elected on the backs of those society does not want to see in public regardless of what the stats and data has to show.
Just the other day, in one string of articles in a major online search engine news section, I counted six (6!) educators who were either arrested for alleged sex crimes or convicted of the same across the country and one religious leader arrested for the same as well Those in positions of trust abusing it as they are either alleged or convicted to have done.
But by all means, let’s look for the imaginary person under the bush outside neighborhood public swimming pool that doesn’t exist.