Finding Registered Sex Offenders Near Your Home

As a Navy spouse, I assumed that my military housing neighborhood was relatively safe for my kids, provided we stayed away from the townie gangs on the edges. I was wrong. A neighbor came tearing over to my house one day, quite distraught. "Did you know a sex offender is driving an ice cream truck through the neighborhood?"

Um. No, I didn't. She shared her information with me. Apparently, another neighbor down the street had been chatting with the truck driver for some reason, and he let it slip that he'd been to prison. Why, she wanted to know. He told her it was a BS sex offense. That someone had said he touched their kid, and then he went to jail for it.

Hmmm. Having worked for lawyers in the past, I knew several ways to access criminal records online. So I started digging. This man, who always smiled as he drove his jangly way through the neighborhood, had in fact served five years on three different counts. Well, I thought, maybe he's served his time.

Meanwhile, as the word spread, other women in the neighborhood started checking with their kids. Do you know that ice cream truck driver? Sure, the kids said. We're careful around him. He's traded ice cream for peeks.

!!!!

"Peeks" meant exactly what it sounds like. I started getting information together, contacted my husband, alerted the command. Though it was a Navy neighborhood and supposedly all vendors are supposed to be vetted by the civilian housing management, this one had somehow slipped their attention. The chiefs and officers, many with young teen daughters in our neighborhod, were furious.

Ice cream business dried up, of course. More significantly, things started working through the command. And I started wondering: if this one slipped through, had others slipped through as well?

Your Best Resource: Map Sex Offenders

Serendipitiously, just weeks before the ice cream scandal, I'd heard on the news about a new website called MapSexOffenders.com. With this site, concerned parents could check their own home addresses for any registered sex offenders who might live in the neighborhood. It had been developed by a couple of Utah software designers, and was -- is -- free online for anyone to use.

It works by crossing mapping software with sex offender registry lists maintained by most states, currently covering 45 states with a goal of merging in the other 5 in the near future. Provided the information on the registry is accurate, you can see all local registered sex offenders marked on the map near your home -- and by clicking on links in the map marks, you can see their offense and a picture of the offender.

Problems With This Resource

When MapSexOffenders first came out, activists argued that it would make sex offenders into targets, giving those who wished them harm an easy way to locate them. (Three years later, there have been no cases I'm aware of where this happened, but it still could.)

The biggest danger, however, is complacency. Anyone using MapSexOffenders.com should be aware that the information on it is only as good and as accurate as the state's sex offender registry. 95% of habitual sex offenders, according to one statistic, move frequently to avoid unwanted attention and to find fresh victims; often, they move in with friends or relatives rather than maintaining their own address. This makes it exceptionally difficult to maintain accurate information.

MapSexOffenders.com should be used as a guideline -- to let you know how close known registered sex offenders are to your home, your child's school, and your child's park and bus stop. In at least one case, a parent checking the registry found out that the parent of one of her children's friends was an offender. If you don't find any sex offenders in your neighborhood, you should not get complacent and decide that there are none there to be found.

The Ice Cream Truck Guy

In my case, a check revealed that the ice cream truck guy not only was a sex offender against children, but he lived in Navy housing as well, not more than a mile away. Worse, there was another sex offender in the neighborhood, less than a block away. Sharing this information led to some ugly truths -- that the second sex offender had indeed been trying to lure little girls and watched them with binoculars, for one. But worse, due to housing regulations, there was no legal way the command could remove the sex offenders from our neighborhood. The housing company, which was starting to place civilians in military housing that wasn't filled, had let them in without checking their records, and there they would remain.

Since this happened, housing regulations did change; the management office was required to do a background check on each potential new lessee and their housemates. And the ice cream truck stopped going through the neighborhood, and its driver soon moved somewhere else. But the vigilance of the mothers in this area has been raised, and now they have a new tool to use. It is unlikely that they will ever be caught unaware again.