Finding sex offenders: It's our responsibility

It is curious that despite the online revolution and the explosion of the World Wide Web, the public's access to some crucial information is still limited.

For example, how can you track sex offenders? If you have children, you want to know if convicted offenders are living in your community - because they might be living right next door.

Think about it. How would you know if the Little League coach is a convicted sex offender? How about the woman you send your kids to for day care? Even worse, does your children's school thoroughly check the credentials of all their staff? How about your church? If you want to do a little checking yourself, you might be interested to know there are a number of relevant Web sites. Check out www.sexoffenders.net and www.childabuse.com to see a couple of attempts to make the information on offenders available to the public.

Unfortunately, these sites just scratch the surface, and their data is incomplete. For example, with more than 1,000 offenders in Ventura County, Calif., sexoffenders.net only shows data on the offenders categorized as "high-risk."

High-risk means they have committed three or more sexual or serious crimes. That's a problem as far as I'm concerned because I'm just as worried about those who have committed only one or two crimes.

I did discover that there is a much more comprehensive database available called the Megan's Law Database (MLDB), which is computerized but is not online. It was named after Megan's Law, which was created following the truly awful case of 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered by a convicted child molester who had moved into her neighborhood.

Thus it was that I found myself down at the Ventura police station signing a form to get access to the database. The form is a government requirement, I was told, to prevent sex offenders from getting access to the database for reasons that couldn't be adequately explained by anyone.

The current database contains 73,254 records for California, of which around 1,500 concern high-risk cases. There are 1,254 records for Ventura County, where I live, and 318 in the city of Ventura. Of those 318, five are high-risk. I was shocked to find that there were 741 cases in California in which the offender was a woman!

In the MLDB, you only get the zip code, not the whole address (and many records are flagged "whereabouts unknown"). You do, however, get pictures of the offenders and a list of their crimes. But don't try to photograph the screen or you'll be in trouble. You can only take notes.

But shouldn't all of this data be put online, you may be asking? Well, I would say yes, but it looks as if no one has a political interest to do so.

What if we, information industry professionals, were to build a Web site and, using a network of volunteers to copy the record data, post everything but the pictures? And how about we follow the offender's whereabouts on the site. We could have links to each case so that these people could be tracked by public reports.

Now I know that the bleeding-heart response will be along the lines of "but there's a danger that these people will be harassed." Sure, that's a real possibility, but given the recidivism rate, there's a more profound danger to our children. Plus, might I point out, these offenders implicitly surrendered their right to be a member of our society when they attacked our children.

I've got the tentative agreement from an Internet service provider to design and host the Web site. So the question is, do we care enough? If we, the people who know and understand the power of computers and communications, don't make this kind of information available, no one else is going to do it.

What do you think? Start a thread or reach Gibbs directly at nwcolumn@gibbs.com