Child Abuse - What is it

CHILD RAPE & ABUSE
Offenders Return to Society, but Under Her Watchful Eye
New York Times May 19, 2008
By Dan Barry: Dickinson, N.D.

An unmarked police car so obviously a police car pulls into the circular driveway of a tired motor lodge that was maybe, maybe, a nice place at one time. The driver steps out in a blue-and-white windbreaker long enough to conceal the Glock on her right hip.

She approaches a guest room and knocks, standing to the side in keeping with proper procedure. The door opens to cast the morning’s light upon a registered sex offender named James Oscar Thompson. He is 36, dark-haired, about 5-foot-3, and high-risk; he is wearing an oversize red shirt emblazoned with the name of his fast-food employer.

His visitor, Detective Amanda McNamee of the Dickinson Police Department, asks whether she can come in. He says yes. “How’s it going?” she asks. “Pretty good,” he says. So continues another awkward but necessary conversation between one of this small city’s 20 registered sex offenders and the woman assigned to keep an eye on them.

The efficiency room is dark but clean. Its bed is covered with a blanket depicting a tiger. Its television is shouting. Its occupant is attracted to under-age girls.

The detective asks how the offender is getting to work today; a relative is driving him, he says. The detective asks whether he is keeping up with his rent; barely, he says. He volunteers that he went to his Pentecostal church last night for a prayer meeting that lasted nearly two hours.

“So yeah,” the offender says, “I’m trying to play it safe.”

Detective McNamee does not say Good for you. She just moves on to the next question, her eyes hunting about, her mind filing away data on the case of James Oscar Thompson, who is back among us after serving his prison time for having intercourse with a 14-year-old girl.

“So how are you feeling mentally?” she asks. He stutters around some issues, his hands fumbling in the folds of his work shirt, before he returns to answer her question. He says that he likes to be around friends, but that it might be better if he keeps to himself for a while.

“I think I got, like, overwhelmed, or got back off track, man,” Mr. Thompson says. “I don’t want to get that way again. I just gotta take it slow this time. I like having friends, but...”

“You’ve got to keep having friends that are — adults,” Detective McNamee says. “Right?”

“Right,” the offender answers.

Dickinson, near the Badlands of western North Dakota, has nearly 16,000 people living within its 9.5 square miles. And, like anywhere else, it has its share of registered sex offenders, working in the oil fields and at the drive-thru window, browsing at the Wal-Mart and in the Prairie Hills Mall, appearing prominently on local and state Web sites because they cannot be trusted around children.

In addition to being fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for a DNA sample, they must register with local law enforcement officials within three days of moving into a community. This includes providing home address, employer’s address, e-mail address and any information regarding motor vehicles, schools and “social networking.”

Every now and then the police department sends a news release to the local newspaper to report that a high-risk offender has moved to town. Its boilerplate text explains that notification is being made “in the belief that an informed public is a safer public,” but that the information “is not to be used to threaten, harass, assault, or intimidate the registered offenders.”

In the end, one person monitors the registered sex offenders of Dickinson: Detective McNamee, 27, the wife of a night-shift supervisor at the Baker Boy plant and the mother of two children, one 19 months old, the other 4 months old. She originally went to college to become a teacher, but the thought of herding kindergartners pushed her in another direction.

“I’d rather deal with sex offenders,” she says, half-kidding.

She joined the police department in 2003, becoming one of only two women on a force of about two dozen. For two years she rode patrol in a city that hasn’t had a murder in several years; she mediated domestic quarrels, quieted barking dogs, learned which bars tended to mark closing time with fistfights.

When she transferred to the investigations unit in 2006, she saw an opportunity to improve the way the department kept track of the city’s registered sex offenders. Now she has her “high-risk guys,” her “moderate-risk guys” and her “low-risk guys,” a few of whom reside upstairs from her office, in the Southwest Multi-County Correction Center. She makes a point of meeting each one of these inmates to say, “When you’re out, I’ll come see you.”

Detective McNamee checks in on her 11 low-risk offenders every few months, including the peeper who favors binoculars. She gives much closer scrutiny to her five moderate-risk offenders and her four high-risk offenders; they include an 80-year-old man who exposes himself to children and a father who raped his 5-year-old daughter. She keeps track of them through telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings that are nothing if not guarded.

“I know that it’s important to them that they think that I trust them,” she says. “I’ll let them think that. But that’s not how it is.”

She does not shy away from asking them about their crimes. “They usually minimize their crime big-time,” she says. “But I want to see how much they own their crime.”

Still, they have rights, so she is respectful. And it is better for all concerned if they have a job and a place to stay, so she is extremely grateful to employers and landlords who take them in. This way, she says, “I know where they are.”

Back at the motor lodge, Detective McNamee winds up her conversation with Mr. Thompson, who tells her that he plans to go to prayer group more often because it seems to help. She wonders whether he says this because he means it, or because he thinks she would like to hear it. She simply nods and says he’ll be hearing from her soon.

She drives on to another motel, seedier than the first, with a neon sign advertising the amenity of color TV. She stands to the side of Room 35 and knocks. Another registered sex offender, Tracy Brosseau, 45, with steel-gray hair cut short, opens the door to the fetid room; a visitor of his, a drug user known to her, scurries out.

The detective’s tone is all authority, so much so that when she asks whether she can look around, Mr. Brosseau has no choice but to say sure. It’s as though the weight of her voice keeps him planted on his unkempt bed, with his body facing a television tuned to the Lifetime channel.

She finds little food in the refrigerator, a hygienic challenge in the bathroom and a pair of earrings on the dresser. Hmmm. He says they belong to that guy who just left. She files it away.

Detective McNamee continues her rounds, knocking on doors, reading names on mailboxes, checking up on the sex offenders of Dickinson. All the while she knows that when her shift ends, she will park her unmarked cruiser and use the family’s minivan to collect her children from day care.

Then she will feed them, bathe them and tuck them into bed.