Our old singer is a sex criminal
Over lunch I read on jwz’s blog about a
offender in Florida winning the lottery and was somewhat surprised
by the ad syndication offering pictures of sex offenders. “Who wants
to see a bunch of pictures of sex offenders?” I thought. Mail order
brides are one thing, but who’s into sex offenders? Then I had this
epiphany about my obvious bias against almost all kinds of advertising
and realized “hey, this could actually be useful and isn’t just about
helping me hook up (like most of the online advertising).” This was
an interesting observation.
So I clicked the link and got to some page that had nothing to do
with sex offenders or seeing where they are in my neighborhood.
Thankfully, my fragile world of stereotypes about ads and marketing
didn’t completely come down around me.
But I was inspired enough to do another quick search and find two
useful resources for finding sex offenders in Seattle near various
neighborhoods. This isn’t really anything I’ve thought about much in
the past (in spite of hearing stories from Moshe about the notice he
received when a level 3 sex offender moved into his neighborhood), but
now that I’ve got a dog and Tanya and I spend a decent amount of time
taking him for walks, I’ve realized it might be helpful to know which
sections of town are best avoided.
One resource is the from the
County Sheriff’s office sex offender search which lets you search
for level 2 or 3 sex offenders by zip code or by name. Another, more
useful, page is the
Offender Information Center which also lets you search by similar
criteria and presents a map showing where sex offenders and has links
to mug shots. The especially creepy thing is that there are 21
registered sex offenders with valid addresses within a few miles of
where I live, 18 of them live on a similar perimeter which follows the
border of the University of Washington.