State promotes new sex offender tracking system

Personnel from the Nevada Division of Parole and Probation will host a meeting today to discuss a new program to improve the tracking of sex offenders throughout the state.

The sex offender tracking and observation program will distribute information about known and suspected sex offenders to agencies and public organizations.

That information will be used to inform communities about the potential threat of sexual predators in an effort to stop crimes before they start, said Division Operations Manager John Gould.

"It's an attempt to combine the entire law enforcement community together to track registered and unregistered sex offenders," he said. "The information will be distributed from a database we will keep updated."

Today's meeting will be open to the public, law enforcers and community organizations. The scheduled start is 2 p.m. at the Reno Parole and Probation office at 1301 Cordone Ave.

Gould said the recent rape and murder of 9-year-old Krystal Steadman in Stateline was not the motivation for the program's inception.

"We started planning this prior to that incident," he said. "But those kind of instances just make us want to implement the program faster."

Currently, parole and probation officers and local law enforcement work independently to track sex offenders. The lack of communication makes it easy for them to slip through the cracks by moving to a jurisdiction where they are not known, Gould said.

Often, law enforcement agencies' first notifications come when a person's background is investigated for an unrelated crime. Carson City's latest sex offender notification was the result of the arrest of 61-year-old James William Londo.

Londo was classified as a high-risk offender. He was convicted in California in 1962 of forcible rape and 1968 of kidnapping and rape by force. He was arrested in August for failing to register as a sex offender in Carson City.

Carson City's only other know high-risk offender is Gary Joe Cook.

Parole and Probation classifies the offenders in three levels of risk to the community. Information about lowest level offenders is shared among law enforcement agencies only. If a person is under suspicion in a sex-related case, he or she qualifies for this classification.

The presence of level two offenders is made known to schools and public organizations such as the Girl Scouts or the Boys & Girls Club, places where the offenders are prohibited by law.

Full public notification is made for level three offenders. They are believed to be at high risk for repeating sex crimes.

Public sex offender notification was mandated in Nevada in 1997 through a revised statute.