Finding Public Information

In California sex offenders must be registered as a result of a new law (see meganslaw.ca.gov for more information). To provide anyone with information on more then 63,000 persons the State of California has built a special search engine where you can search for sex offenders close to your home, your kids schools, or just any ZIP code in California you like.

In their database they got over 33,500 home addresses of sex offenders in the California communities. The addresses are however the last reported by the offender so in some cases it may be old information.

If you know the name of the offender you can also search for that or you can simply just enter your own ZIP code to find offenders close to you even if you don’t know their names.

When you do a search in the database you see the results as blue dots on a map where you can just click on any blue dot to find out more about the offender(s) at that location. You can even see photos on some of the offenders.

Is this something that should be allowed? Well, it’s good for families to be able to search for offenders in their neighbourhood, but what about the offenders? They’ve done their time, but now anyone can search for them and also see exactly where they live.

What do you think?

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.