WA- Gov. Gregoire Announces New Sex Offender Tracking Database

How can anyone be proud to announce spending $5,000,000.00 for a phone book of 18,136 former sex offenders ($275.00 each listing without annual costs), when they Yellow pages comes FREE and contains tens of thousands more people. How can this protect the public from new sex crimes when it is a well know fact that, 95% of new sex crimes come from people who have never before committed a sex offense. I guess that -in reality- makes the Yellow pages more valuable for finding those who commit sex crimes.

3-9-2009 Washington:

At a press conference this morning in Olympia, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced Washington's new $5 million online sex offender database to track the whereabouts of the 18,136 sex offenders living here. Well, the system actually knows the location of 13,254 convicted sex offenders, leaving 4,882 unaccounted for.

The database pulls up 835 known sex offenders living in Seattle. For example, within a two mile radius of The Deluxe Bar and Grill on Broadway there are 271 offenders. If you plug in the address of Seattle Center, you'll see that 245 known offenders live within 2 miles of the Space Needle.

This is "community policing at its best," Gregoire said. "Every penny has been well spent."

The new online database allows anyone to search for potential sexual predators living within a two mile, half mile or quarter mile radius of their home, work, church or school.

Gregoire was motivated to create the tracking system after the July 2007 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Zina Linnik in Tacoma.

"We have a much better handle of where our sex offenders are living," Gregoire said.

In addition to where they live, there is also a photo of the offender, as well as their age, height, weight, eye and hair color, along with their race and sometimes, but not allows, the crime, or crimes, they were convicted of.

While this system is meant to help keep people informed of the whereabouts of known sex offenders, "It's not perfect," said Don Pierce, the executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs. "Evil people will continue to do evil things," he said.

By entering your full name, street address and e-mail address, the system will notify you when a registered sex offender moves into your neighborhood. ..News Source.. by Keith Vance