ERLANGER, Ky. — There are at least 40 registered sex offenders within a three-mile radius of Erlanger. While state law requires them to provide a home address, it also allows offenders to mark themselves as homeless, which can cause problems when it comes to knowing their whereabouts.
Police Chief Kyle Rader said sometimes sex offenders will try and hide out at hotels.
"It's no secret that one of our concerns is kind of off the radar, undetected and we want to ensure that we are proactive in making sure our hotels are being used exactly for what they should be," he said. "We don't want people to take up residence in a hotel just to be able to add that address as their home base."
Through a proposed ordinance first discussed during a Tuesday night council meeting, Rader explained the benefit of establishing a hotel registry system that would require hotels to keep records of tenants.
Rader said Erlanger would be playing catch-up with other cities that already have similar ordinances in place — including Fort Wright, Fort Mitchell and Blue Ash.
"Just give us something else as law enforcement, something else in our tool belt that we can see who's frequenting the hotels or who maybe has taken up a residence. Just doing something really that they shouldn't be," he said.
But City Attorney Jack Gatlin highlighted another issue that could benefit from the ordinance.
In the past few years, officers have been responding to a certain area of the city more often — where three of the city's hotels are located, right off the interstate.
"It's not necessarily the hotels that are getting the calls for service," Gatlin said. "It's people who are in the parking lots. It's people are being pulled over nearby. It's other activities."
Rader said there's a chance those charged with traffic or drug offenses are spending at least one night at some of those hotels.
"We were making more and more arrests and on the face of it, it looked like well, are these people all staying in the hotels? Are people coming to the hotels in Erlanger to deal drugs?" he said. "It's not fair to say that the hotels knew about this and they're not doing anything. That's why we're looking at this as a partnership and hoping we can get some input from them also."
The hotel guest registry would be added to the city's existing nuisance ordinance, which was added to the books a little over a year ago with a specific focus on frequent property offenders, residents known to law enforcement because of repeated calls for service.
Before an ordinance goes into effect, city council would discuss benefits and concerns with local hotel and motel owners. Rader expects the first of draft legislation to be presented at the council's next caucus meeting on April 16.
"There is no room for anyone asking for information that doesn't pertain to an active, ongoing investigation," said Rader. "So I hope that will put the hotel owners at ease knowing that we're not just driving through a parking lot saying well we want to know who owns that car, we're going to go inside and ask them. That's absolutely not what this is going to be used for."
