California Department of Justice maintains state arson registry list

By: YVETTE URREA - Staff Writer | Friday, July 14, 2006 11:23 PM PDT ∞

NORTH COUNTY ---- Fire and law enforcement investigators who notice a large number of arsons in an area can turn to the state arson registry list to see the addresses and criminal histories of convicted fire starters.

The arson registry list, which is maintained by the California Department of Justice, has 3,761 offenders registered statewide as of June 30, said administrator Randy Poole. In San Diego County, there are approximately 242 arson registrants, according to information from the department's Violent Crime Information Network database and local law enforcement agencies.

A breakdown of each community or city covered by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department was not available, but a sheriff's licensing manager said there were 63 arson offenders in their jurisdiction countywide. Escondido has nine registrants, Oceanside has seven and Carlsbad has one registrant. The San Diego Police Department has 121 arson registrants, Poole said. The others are in other San Diego County cities.

The arson registry list is managed by the Sex Offender Tracking Program, he said, and is significantly smaller than the sex registrant list, which has 108,000 offenders statewide by comparison.

Anyone convicted of serious arson crimes that include maliciously setting fire to property, arson causing great bodily injury, arson of an inhabited structure or property, arson of a structure or forest land, attempted arson, possessing a device for arson, and possessing or manufacturing a firebomb must register with the local law enforcement agency in the area where they reside.

A 1994 arson statute mandated that they register within 14 days after they are released back into the community, Poole said. They must register for life, but only have to update it when they move, he said.

Juveniles convicted of arson crimes only need to register until they turn 25 years old, he said.

Previously, convicted arsonists only had to register for five years after release, Poole said.

No statistics that show how many convicted arsonists comply with the court order were available, he said.

The information in the database is only available to law enforcement and fire investigators, unlike the Megan's Law database, which allows the public to look up serious and high-risk sex offenders living in their area by ZIP codes or names.

Officers or investigators can access basic information on a registrant by entering a name into the state Violent Crime Information Network. If they require additional information on a registrant or if they want to get a list of registrants in a community, they need to contact the state Department of Justice to do a query, Poole said.

Fire investigator Capt. Gary Eidsmoe of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said he has not had the occasion to utilize the arson registry list but he thinks it is a good tool. Instead, Eidsmoe said he maintains his own files on convicted arsonists who are released from prison or jail from letters that are sent by the state Department of Justice to notify his department.

Eidsmoe said that if fires start cropping up, they don't automatically start hounding the registrants, "but we do have them in the back of our minds."

Sgt. Conrad Grayson of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's bomb/arson unit said he has not utilized the registrant list either. He said investigators have to be "very careful" with a list because a person convicted of a crime in the past has served their sentence, and so they should only approach someone if they had evidence or information pointing in a registrant's direction.

Eidsmoe said he would first check his own files, but if he did not find the information he was looking for, he would then go to the state Department of Justice to access its database.

Grayson said the seven reasons an arsonist might set a fire are revenge, profit, vandalism, to conceal another crime, rioting, an abnormal psychology that includes pyromaniacs and sexual satisfaction, and to deny someone else the use of a property as in an eviction.

He said the profile of a typical arsonist is a white man, 30 years old or younger, who has some kind of issue.

The Violent Crime Information Network showed that most of the arson registrants in San Diego County, 184, were men, and that 52 were women, authorities said. No age statistics were available. A breakdown of gender on six other San Diego County sheriff's registrants was not available.

In Escondido, police Lt. David Mankin said six of their registrants were women and only three were men, but elsewhere, men were more numerous. Oceanside counted five men and two women as registrants and Carlsbad had only one male registrant.

Sheriff's licensing manager Adrian Thomas said convicted arsonists who live within the Sheriff's Department's jurisdiction must register at the San Diego Police Department's headquarters.

Contact staff writer Yvette Urrea at (760) 901-4076 or yurrea@nctimes.com.

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