It's a terse, unmistakable mantra, evoking memories of tragedy and failure in a push by the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office to do better.

"Look in the backyard."

Jaycee Dugard's reappearance nearly a year ago and the revelations that followed -- myriad failed chances to discover the hidden backyard compound where registered sex offender and lifetime parolee Phillip Garrido is suspected of having kept Dugard and their two girls -- shone an unforgiving international spotlight on state and local law enforcement.

The emotional and political impact of the case continues to ripple.

Apologies would follow -- one in the form of a $20 million payout approved by the state Legislature -- along with change. Local police call the case a spark for more focused street-level policing. State corrections officials, who oversaw Garrido's parole since 1999, tout an improved system in sex-offender management and enforcement, with better coordination and a host of policy changes to address the kinds of lapses exposed by Dugard's 18-year disappearance.

But whether urgent mantras and a host of parole policy directives signal lasting progress or a misguided knee jerk, or perhaps some of each, remains subject for intense debate, while the state grapples to keep sight of more than 60,000 registered sex offenders.

The pall of failure fell hard on the Sheriff's Office, which patrols the patch of land where Garrido and his wife, Nancy, lived.

Had Garrido lived a few blocks south, it would have fallen on Antioch police to respond to a November 2006 emergency call from a neighbor saying Garrido had a "sexual addiction" and kept young children living in tents in his backyard.

But the cosmic odds chose this virtual island. In the absence of state and federal parole officials explaining their primary roles in monitoring Garrido, Sheriff Warren Rupf took to the podium.

Rupf specifically apologized for a deputy's response -- rather, his lack of one. The deputy had spoken with Garrido in front of the house but never entered. He never checked Garrido's background as a convicted rapist and registered sex offender. Rupf, who is retiring after 18 years in office told a battery of news outlets that his agency had blown its best chance to find her.

"The oversights were relatively minor, but the impact was immense," Rupf said recently in his office. "There were mitigating circumstances, but there are no excuses. It was a failure."

The media horde trumpeted the apology. The Sheriff's Office had paid other visits to the home on Walnut Avenue, during periodic sweeps designed to ensure registered sex offenders were living where they said they were.

At first, corrections officials issued a news release lauding agents for their role in Dugard's discovery. It would be months, after a scathing review by the state Inspector General, before Matthew Cate, the state corrections secretary, apologized for numerous failures to properly classify and monitor Garrido.

"I was not surprised," Rupf said, "but still angry with the lack of response from other government officials." Federal officials, he noted, oversaw Garrido's parole over the years authorities say he kidnapped Dugard and fathered her two girls.

"I'd like to find somebody in federal parole and shake 'em. And tell them how embarrassed I am for them that you're not only willing, but the system allows you to simply stand behind the curtain."

Rupf soon announced that he would not run for a fifth term as sheriff. Murmurs arose that the impact of the Dugard case and his international mea culpa had sapped him.

"If anything, it gave me cause to consider re-election," he said.

Tactical shift

Whatever the fallout for the Sheriff's Office, Rupf points to an array of tactics and programs that were either created or accelerated in the wake of his apology.

Among the first, he said, was stripping divisions between what he called "silos of information" where facts and observations gathered by patrol deputies never reached sex crime investigators, and vice versa. Now, a patrol deputy gets alerts on his in-car computer if a registered sex offender lives within a mile of where a police call originates.

"If you have a missing kid, and you see that you have a sex offender two doors down, he might be someone to look at," said sex crimes Detective Kelly Challand.

The Sheriff's Office also fixed a glaring oversight made obvious when millions of computer users instantly logged onto Google Maps for an aerial view showing the illicit compound that had eluded state and local law enforcement.

Now, included along with a registered sex offender's dossier is an aerial view of the property.

"Look in the backyard."

"I hear people say that all the time," Challand said. "Deputies didn't know there was another backyard. They didn't know the property lines. A guy on the street sees the fence line and assumes that's the end of the yard."

Cooperation between state parole agents, county probation officers and local police has since become enshrined into quarterly meetings on the 1,485 registered sex offenders in Contra Costa County. There are now agreements with the U.S. Marshals Service to extradite sex offenders who skip the state.

Such plans were already in the works, Challand said, but after August 2009, obstacles quickly dissolved.

In February, during the first county sweep after the Dugard revelation, a litany of agencies lent a hand, including a strong showing by state parole agents, who were mostly absent on many previous sweeps.

Local police have seen a payoff. Last month in Walnut Creek, police found a 14-year-old girl at a local motel room. They investigated and learned that her suspected pimp was a paroled sex offender. Detective Greg Leonard said he called a state parole agent who tracked the suspect by GPS, leading to his quick arrest and pending charges.

"It quite possibly saved this girl's life," he said. "I'm not saying from the parolee, but the lifestyle she was in."

That level of communication, before Dugard's reappearance, went lacking, Leonard said.

"I've talked to people that were involved in the Dugard incident," he said. "There's so much regret and what could have been done differently. It's one of those crimes that hits home. "

Monitoring offenders

Significant shifts in parole policy trailed the political torrent over the Garrido case. More recently, criticism over the supervision of ex-parolee John Gardner -- a sex offender who went on to rape and murder two Southern California girls -- has state lawmakers moving swiftly to harden sentences for many sex crimes and lengthen parole terms -- in some cases to life -- for some offenders, while adding polygraph tests and treatment.

A new statewide task force reviews GPS monitoring. Parole agents have undergone new training, and corrections officials have formed GPS "super units," with parole agents assigned exclusively to sex offenders or gang members strapped with monitoring anklets.

Inspector General David Shaw found that parole agents ignored hundreds of alerts in 2008 from the GPS device strapped to Phillip Garrido's ankle, showing it failed to transmit a signal, that he'd veered far from the 25-mile radius under his parole terms and that he had often stayed out past his midnight curfew.

Parole agents monitor sex offenders deemed "high risk" using "active" GPS, meaning they check their daily electronic tracks. Other sex offenders are monitored less frequently, under "passive GPS."

Before the Garrido case, they could check active GPS tracks days later, and there was no policy dictating how often they checked passive GPS parolees. Now they must check active tracks within a day, and the new policy requires them to check two days of passive GPS, twice monthly.

The new policy, instituted in March, also demands that parole agents analyze the tracks -- dots on a computer screen that indicate intervals of 10 minutes or less -- one by one.

The policy also mandates "collateral contacts" -- speaking with neighbors and other people familiar with a parolee -- something agents failed to do in Garrido's case.

At the parole district office in Fairfield, agents assigned to the GPS unit spurn talk about the Garrido case. They prefer to talk about quiet success stories.

Agent Curtis Murry said he nabbed a sex offender parolee in March who had cut off his electronic ankle bracelet and was leaving on a bus for San Diego. GPS recently helped him catch another parolee who was attending youth Narcotics Anonymous meetings to troll for vulnerable girls, he said.

"The only thing (the public) ever hears about is the cases where something goes bad," said Murry, whose caseload includes 13 active and 14 passive GPS cases in Contra Costa.

On a recent afternoon, Murry found an alert for Richard Miranda, a registered sex offender on parole for auto theft. He had left his sister's house in Martinez at 12:30 that morning for a trip out to Bailey Road in East Contra Costa.

Murry checked Miranda's location -- his father's apartment near the Solano drive-in in Concord -- and drove out with two other agents. They banged on the door, shouted, and then Murry set off a vibration on Miranda's anklet. Still nothing. He checked his laptop GPS in the car.

"He's in there," he mouthed to the other agents. They went in, guns drawn.

Miranda was passed out on a bed. There was porn -- 17 magazines, 7 DVDs -- drug residue, a sex toy and a knife. Miranda admitted using methamphetamine and had violated various parole terms, Murry said. He had set up a form of residence there, with a room and a key. Regardless of whether he slept there at night, the apartment was too close to a park under Jessica's Law.

His sex crime, misdemeanor indecent exposure, came 18 years ago. State corrections is applying Jessica's Law, including a GPS requirement, on all registered sex offenders who are on parole for whatever reasons.

"They're lumping everyone together. I'm not a child molester," said Miranda, 47, handcuffed behind his back. "No one should know where you're at 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody."

'Difficult spot'

In some ways the new policies are not enough, in other ways, overkill, said Robert Coombs, chairman of the California Sex Offender Management Board, whose appointed members include corrections and probation officials, prosecutors, victim advocates and treatment experts.

Among other measures, the state is putting in place a kind of score-sheet system for parole violations. In part because of the Garrido and Gardner cases, the state is adding new burdens on overworked parole agents and stripping away their discretion and flexibility -- the time to use their valuable intuition, said Coombs, also spokesman for the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

The idea that agents must analyze each individual "track" for every sex offender is ludicrous, he said.

"Everyone who actually knows the process parole agents go through knows that's a monumental waste of time. That's a response to getting lambasted by the Inspector General and lots of folks in the media," Coombs said.

"We need to recognize the scenario in (the Dugard case) is just so extreme, that really the big failure was we didn't have someone who could imagine the evil he was capable of. The biggest lesson in the Dugard case for me is that law enforcement, parole, all of these different elements need to be working together."

Locally, that may be the most dramatic change -- an attitude shift toward cooperation, spurred in part by worry.

No one wants to be the officer or deputy who failed to find the next Dugard.

"I get calls all night long from deputies on the street who see a sex offender or go to a house," he said. "They want to make sure before leaving the scene that they're getting everything right."

A catchy motto doesn't hurt.

"Look in the backyard," Rupf repeated. "I extend that to virtually everything we do."

Contact John Simerman at 925-943-8072. Contact Robert Salonga at 925-943-8013.