Call me!

After writing my post yesterday, I was reading my email in the living room and came across a message sent by a Lincoln resident who was a little upset to learn that a neighbor had been arrested and convicted of sexual assault. Here's an excerpt:

"We just knew he had not been seen in awhile. Only after I did not see him around Christmas time did I start to ask questions. I was amazed to find the information I needed a year ago on the Nebraska Department of Corrections Inmate locator search engine"

The author was a bit unhappy that for a year between the arrest and conviction, this man, who appeared to be a respectable long-time resident of the neighborhood, had gone about his merry way without anyone knowing that he was awaiting trail for a felony sex crime. He was suggesting that we borrow the same technology used by Lincoln Public School's automatic dialing system to phone parents and advise them of people in the district who have been arrested or convicted of sex crimes.

I can just imagine the legal counsel's reaction to that one. I emailed him back, and told him I understood his shock and concern, but that in a I can't imagine we would really want the police, in a democratic society, making phone calls to an entire elementary school attendance district to let people know about the arrest of a citizen--especially when he or she has not been convicted. The concept that a person is innocent until proven guilty is fundamental to our system of justice.

I also provided him with some information about the Nebraska State Patrol's sex offender registry, since this man will be required to register upon his release. I also gave him some information about the fabulous VINE website, where he could sign up for an automated notification by either phone or email anytime the subject's custody status changes.

The conversation got me thinking, though, about post-release sex offender notification. For the general public, the method of finding out that the new neighbor is a registered sex offender is to check. You can look up your zip code area on the State Patrol's website, check a specific name, or keep your eye peeled for the fine print notices published from time to time in the local newspaper. I suspect that not many people do that, though. It's a "pull" process of going out and fetching information that you may not even know you want in the first place.

There is, as my correspondent suggested, another way: that information could be pushed out, either to people who register one time (like VINE) or when triggered by a geographic query (like our Crime Alerts through crimemapping.com). Florida does just that. I'm not necessarily advocating this. I have a few concerns that give me pause, one of which about the quality of geocoding sex offenders. The process of computer matching addresses to maps is something I am intimately familiar with, and even with excellent quality data (like our crime data) there is a certain level of error inherent in the process. Nonetheless, the technology is pretty straightforward, and we use it extensively in-house to push various kinds of notifications and alerts to commanders.