Sex offender registries allow parents to search for predators who may live near their home. But what happens when you're out at the playground?
As Apple likes to say, there's an app for that.
It's called Offender Locator. The $1.99 application combines the iPhone's GPS and Internet capabilities with data from sex offender registries across the nation.
"A dollar 99 is a pretty cheap price for that peace of mind," says parent Brian Rawlins. He searched online databases to see the sex offenders living near his Independence home, but wanted something portable so he could see potential threats to his five year old daughter in real time.
"I was just looking at it last night," Rawlins says, "and I was surprised to see that there's somebody within a mile of my daughter's kindergarten. To me that's very frightening."
You don't have to know where you are because the phone already has your location and passes it along to Offender Locator. How many parents know the exact street address of their children's playground?
The program uses that information to create a map of sex offenders registered nearby. In the case of one Cincinnati park, we found eight sex offenders within a mile of the park boundaries. Yet parents played with their children blissfully unaware there were several predators registered in the area.
"It's instantaneous and it's right there with you all the time," says Keri Glemaker of the Cincinnati-based
National Coalition For The Protection of Children And Families. "If you go out of town, if you're on vacation, you're looking at colleges, whatever. Anywhere you go, this application will work for you," she says.
The application is easy, but it isn't fool proof. The information is not pulled from government registries in real time. Weeks may pass between downloads to the company's servers. We found one page of sex offenders displayed where five out of eight addresses wee out of date. That was close to a halfway house where there's a lot of turnover.
But the real power of the application is the ability to put photographs of actual sex offenders in the hands of parents where and when they need them most. If you click on a name in the list, the offender's mug shot appears with a description and their criminal record.
"Not to be paranoid, but you know you definitely want to be more cautious and just watch out for certain people, says Rawlins. "And if you know what they look like, which that's one of the best things about this app, they give you that picture."
