Renting to the sex offender next door

Cathy Seipp, a frequent contributor to NRO and the Wall Street Journal, has a column today reporting on the dilemma of rental property owners in California.

Did you know that in California, child molesters and rapists are a protected class? It's true. Not only are California landlords banned from using the state's Megan's Law database to decline renting their properties to sex offenders, they're not even allowed to warn other tenants that these paroled criminals are now their neighbors. If they do the first, they can be fined $25,000 for housing discrimination. But if they don't do the second, they can be sued for failing to protect tenants against a known danger.

Landlords are caught between a rock, a hard place and the California State Assembly's Public Safety Committee, which last April stalled a bill designed to fix the Catch-22. The California Apartment Association is planning a grassroots effort to revive the bill, written by Assembly member Nicole Parra (D., Bakersfield), when the legislature reconvenes in January. Ms. Parra got the California Megan's Law registry online a year ago; before that, it was only available at police stations.

Ah, the old damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't!

It's a good read, and it brings up an interesting question: How often do you check the sex offender registry for your own neighborhood? A lot of places, like here in Oklahoma, have the registry online. If you have children, you ought to be checking and we see no problem with driving the neighborhood to get a good idea of exactly where these residents are. After all, you're not there to torch the place; you just want to be able to point out the house, or the street, to your kids as you tell them to ride their bikes somewhere else.

One problem: data bases aren't always kept up to date. There ought to be a requirement that each entry be time-stamped, and another box should show the reader when the registry as posted was last checked for accuracy, and updated.