9-8-2009 National:
What's great about the iPhone is if you want to check for registered sex offenders in your neighborhood, there's an app for that. I'm not making this up. The iPhone sex offender locator app is called Offender Locator and uses the GPS in your iPhone to locate registered sex offenders living near your current location.
The iPhone sex offender locator app will also allow you to see if any registered sex offenders live near any of your contacts (just in case you wanted to warn any of your friends or business associates) and also let's you look up a specific address.
Once the iPhone sex offender locator app discovers a registered sex offender in your area, it will display a photo of the sex offender and list all the offenses that person has committed. The location of the sex offenders are shown on a map in the form of a red bubble with a green bubble signifying your current location.
So far, testing on the iPhone sex offender locator app has proven to be fairly accurate. However, at this time, the iPhone sex offender locator app is not interactive meaning you cannot touch on a red bubble to access a particular registered sex offender's information. You can only access that information from the Offender List screen. I'm sure that will change sometime soon.
So just how useful is the iPhone sex offender locator app? Well, for example, let's say you're out spending the day at the park with your kids and there is some creepy guy hanging out that looks like he has no business being at a kids park, just fire up the iPhone sex offender locator app and see if his picture pops up. You get a match, you may want to think about rounding up the little kiddies.
Read carefully what he says, because unless the "creepy guy (which does not fit the description of 99% of RSOs)" is a LOCAL registered sex offender (Local being within a mile or so of the park you are in) those being the only pictures that will be displayed, there is no way to tell if the "creepy guy" is a registered sex offender. So the iPhone application has EXTREMELY LIMITED value, if any, for personal safety.
Sex offenders who do recidiviate, do not recidivate where they live. Garrido's crimes were 160 miles away from where he lived, and a Minnesota DOC study also showed offenders commit their crimes away from their homes.
..Source.. by Gabriel Dorman
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