Sex offenders who are on probation in one Georgia city must report to City Hall for three hours Halloween night while many children are out trick-or-treating, despite the controversial nature of the plan.
Gary Jones, the mayor of Grovetown, announced on Facebook that the offenders will be “housed” in the City Council chambers from 6-9 p.m. Oct. 31 “in order to ensure the safety of our children.”
Grovetown, in Columbia County near the South Carolina border, has 25 to 30 sex offenders, he said.
The reporting offenders will be overseen by four officers, according to Jones.
In a later post, he clarified that this will be a joint effort with the state’s probation and community supervision department.
“I am not personally going to pick up, round up, call or going to any sex offender’s home,” Jones said. “This is legal. ... good grief!”
The move isn’t unprecedented in Georgia. According to the Georgia Department of Community Supervision, it can require people who are out on parole to report to a certain location, and can impose curfews on sex offenders.
In the past few years, several Georgia counties said they had plans to personally visit sex offenders who were out on parole on Halloween to make sure they followed a curfew. In 2015, Douglas County required its offenders to report to the old county jail the night of Halloween.
However, sex crime rates against children do not tend to increase on or around Halloween, according to a 2009 study that analyzed more than 67,000 cases from 1997 through 2005.
“These findings,” the researchers wrote, “raise questions about the wisdom of diverting law enforcement resources to attend to a problem that does not appear to exist.”
In the comments under Jones’ post, several people seemed thankful for the decision. Others, however, questioned the morality of the plan to house the offenders at City Hall.
“Are you going to make a prison camp for them next?” one commenter wrote. “What you are planning on doing is against the few liberties this collection of people have.”
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