At The Center’s Community Coalition Lunch last Friday, San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis addressed the San Diego LGBT Pride sex offender controversy that has caused sparks within San Diego’s GLBT community over the past several weeks, saying that no child molester she has processed during her career as a deputy district attorney was ever completely rehabilitated.

Dumanis, who said she dealt with over 2,000 cases involving physical, sexual and emotional child abuse as a deputy district attorney, said she is now working on an initiative and legislation with Governor Schwarzenegger that calls for all convicted sex offenders and Penal Code 290 registrants to be required to wear a GPS monitor for the rest of their life.

“My experience is, if you want to talk about what rehabilitation is for a sex offender, it means containment. It doesn’t mean that you cure them, because it is like a sexual orientation.... It’s internal,” Dumanis said. “What you teach the offender is how to resist the temptation, resist the impulse.”

The state of California now requires all sex offenders to register with Megan’s Law, a Web site that provides the public with sex offenders’ addresses and conviction records.

Dumanis said of the new initiative proposal, “They will obviously [still] have to register for Megan’s Law. They will not be able to be living within 2,000 feet of any parks or children’s area.”

Dumanis said there are over 3,800 registered sex offenders in San Diego County, and many of them are living near schools and playgrounds.

“I’m not willing to take a risk that somebody’s impulses are going to be controlled if they’re going to be around children, period,” she said. “If they’re a person that’s going to be around adults and they have a history of sexual violence – kidnapping, rape, that kind of stuff – I don’t want them near adults. I think it’s pretty plain and simple.”

After someone posed a question about a nonviolent sex offender working in a volunteer capacity where they are not around children, Dumanis said she is still not comfortable with the idea.

She said it was unfortunate how the controversy surrounding the registered sex offenders who worked for San Diego LGBT Pride transpired, but still remained firm on her opinion that sex offenders have no business working at any event where children are present.

“I don’t believe that sex offenders, particularly pedophiles, ever put it in the past,” she added. “In every case I’ve ever handled, without one case being prosecuted, they admit to many, many more.”

She explained that the penal code determines whether an individual is required to register as a sex offender, and most are on the felony level. Only a person convicted of indecent exposure, Penal Code 314.1, is required to register as a lesser offense.

“Don’t for a moment believe that the volunteers that were in the Pride situation were just doing something that wasn’t very serious, because I’ve looked at the cases,” she said. “I know what they are. They were very, very serious.”

Dumanis, who is San Diego’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer and is also the nation’s first openly gay district attorney, is up for re-election next year.

As an openly gay Republican, Dumanis has often been criticized for her political beliefs, but stressed that it’s crucial to have liberal-minded Republicans in office in any capacity.

“One of the things that I’m most proud about is that I think I changed a lot of people’s views of the GLBT community just by virtue of some of the things that I do,” she said. “There are a lot of moderate Republicans in the Republican Party now, and it’s just like moderate Democrats. I think you could interchange them in a lot of issues and I think it’s important to have both.... Having the moderate people involved and having openly gay people involved, especially in positions of power, is very important.”

Since her election in January 2003, Dumanis, an experienced felony prosecutor, criminal trial judge and law enforcement manager, made it a priority to establish three divisions to handle different aspects of crime within the community. The cold homicides unit is tasked with trying to solve over 2,000 unsolved murder cases in San Diego. So far they have solved 11 cases, including a 20-year-old murder case.

Dumanis also helped form the sexual assault unit, handling people who have been sexually assaulted from beginning to end. The DA’s office handles Penal Code 290 sex offender registrants, as well as sexually violent predator cases.

The narcotics unit she formed handles drug trafficking and demand. It works with the drug court on treatment utilizing Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act. The proposition went into effect in 2001 and allows first- and second-time nonviolent drug possession offenders the opportunity to receive substance abuse treatment instead of incarceration.