Officers face rise in sex offender caseload

Seattle unit fears weakened supervision of high-risk felons

By CLAUDIA ROWE
P-I REPORTER

Though police believe intensive supervision is the surest way to prevent repeat crimes by sex offenders, state Department of Corrections officials have quietly decided to ramp up caseloads for Seattle community corrections officers who oversee the state's largest concentration of high-risk rapists and child molesters.

Daily, these officers visit recently released sex offenders at their homes and workplaces, sometimes spending more than an hour in consultation with each, comparing notes with police and generally monitoring the felons' every move.

Now, they worry, supervision will be cursory, at best.

"In today's world, that's a pretty scary proposition," said Ton Johnson, president of the officers' union.

Johnson might have been thinking of one supervised felon -- a crack-addicted man who called his corrections officer near midnight, sobbing that he'd been living in the bushes of a King County park, planning to rape a little girl. The man had gone so far as to buy a blowup doll, dress it in child's pajamas and practice on it.

Or another client who worked a regular job but occasionally felt he needed to rape somebody. Or another, with a history of violent sex assaults, who lured a woman to a hotel room and, after attempting to rape her, took several bites out of her body.

"The point was to have 25 of these offenders and supervise the heck out of them," said Iris Peterson, a community corrections officer who has spent 15 years working with such felons, all of whom were judged a high risk to reoffend. "They don't just show up at our office once a month and say hi -- these guys take a lot of time, and the concern is that we'll have too many offenders to meaningfully supervise."

In coming months, officials said, Peterson's current caseload of 20 could increase by 50 percent, to 30 offenders.

The move has yet to be formally announced, but Corrections officials said it would be phased in gradually and affect mainly the nine officers working Seattle's high-risk sex offender unit.

"The goal is to bring them into line with similar units elsewhere in the state," said Gary Larson, a spokesman for the agency. "Seattle was the only unit that did not have the caseload levels that would be expected."

The city also has more sex offenders than any other urban center in Washington. Seattle houses 7 percent of the state's 19,777 registered offenders -- nearly as many as are living in all of Snohomish County, according to figures from the State Patrol.

"It doesn't feel like they're looking at the ramifications. It's sort of 'we'll see what happens when it happens' and that's not really good practice," said Patricia Turner, a community corrections officer in Seattle.

Seattle Police Detective Bob Shilling, who works in the department's sex crimes and kidnapping unit, said Corrections' caseload increase could have "serious ramifications for public safety."

"The officers that do this job are really on top of their guys. They know what's going on," he said. "But they are also stretched to the limit and I am really concerned if they start piling on more and more cases, (that) the amount of supervision is going to go down. It's just that simple. There's no way they can keep up the intensive pace they're doing now."

Shilling, a 17-year veteran of the beat, said the only thing he'd seen that made a measurable difference in recidivism was intensive supervision of offenders.

"It is absolutely essential that they make as many contacts with these guys as they can while they're on supervision," Shilling said. "There's lots of research that shows that."

Nationally, the picture is cloudier. Researchers at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, combing through stacks of crime reports from around the country, found results split equally between supervision programs that prevented new sex crimes and oversight that had no measurable effect.

Either way, Seattle residents such as Carole Jordan are worried at the prospect of an increased workload for officers.

Over the last 10 years, Jordan has seen her Belltown neighborhood become home to ever-greater numbers of released sex offenders. She has followed officers on their rounds, impressed at just how much they know about each client -- their behaviors, triggers and habits.

"I'm very concerned that we're overloading all these people," she said. "I don't see how they handle what they do now."

But Bonnie Muccilli, a Corrections field administrator who oversees the King County sex offender unit, suggested that staffers were overreacting.

"I do not feel that it is a concern," she said. "I think it's workable."