A reader sent me a head’s up the other day about a new website that purports to allow you to learn about a person’s criminal history or just search your neighborhood to see who’s been busted for what. Appropriately named criminalsearches.com, I held off posting about it until I checked it out to see if it was real. There have been some spoof sites that claimed the same, and I’m dumb enough to fall for them.
Well, this is the real McCoy.
It begs some questions. Is this reliable? Does it smear the innocent along with the guilty? My understanding is that the content is derived from governmental sources, and we all know how reliable that can be. The government is never wrong. Except when it’s wrong. And what about showing arrests that resulted in acquittals or dismissals? Experience with government databanks is that bad news goes in, but good news rarely comes out. It’s just not worth the government’s effort to clean up the mess.
With the foregoing in mind, what does this information provide to the public? The depth of the information is, as would be expected, negligible. Some numbers and the name of the offense, in the lingo of the charging authority, but nothing about the underlying crime. In the absence of information, most people are inclined th fear the worst. This could impact block parties.
As people check out their neighbors and their kids, their children’s dates and their parents, the teachers at school and the classmates, will it be voyeurism or security? Will word spread like wildfire about the sex offender and the thief, so people can point and whisper as they walk into the room? What about the speeder, or the DUI? How evil are they really?
As I maneuvered around the website, I found myself checking out my neighborhood, and a few particular people I know, just for fun. And that’s when I realized, that checking criminal histories of people you know “for fun” was a sick thing to do. These are real people, and here I’ve objectified them, not as sex objects but crime objects. It adds nothing to my knowledge of who to deal with, but was titillating knowing who had a record and kinda for what. It’s different when you know who the people are. I was not pleased with myself.
We are an information society, expecting to find anything about anyone at anytime. Yet it adds so little to our understanding. Like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, we know the price of everything and value of nothing.
This is a bad website. But it’s real, and it’s here, and that’s that. There is no way to get the genie back in the bottle.
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I searched for two criminals I know of (the Knox brothers; Jerry Lee and Gregory) — they’re both in prison for assaulting a grandmother of my acquaintance — and neither of them showed up.
Maybe I’m missing something, but they both show up on the MN DOC site — http://info.doc.state.mn.us/publicviewer/Inmate.asp?OID=216889 ; http://info.doc.state.mn.us/publicviewer/Inmate.asp?OID=215150– neither of them shows up in this database.
(Not exactly Lex Luthors; one of the several things that made Jerry easy for Fluffy to identify was that he had his name tattooed on his neck.)
Given how easy it was to find false negative, I’d be less than surprised to find that this site gives false positives, as well.
Oh, and in response to your title: both, of course, depending on the information.
I’m utterly uninterested — other than pruriently — as to whether or not my neighbor was convicted of, say, recreational use of marijuana last century (or, for that matter, last week); I’d be more than a little interested to know if I’ve a Level III sex offender on my block.
Speeder? I live in Minnesota; everybody’s an occasional speeder. DUI? Well, it depends. If it’s somebody with a ten-year-old DUI, I’m not interested; if it’s somebody with, say, 27 DUI convictions (and, yes, we have those), I’d want my kids and wife to know that I’m strongly of the opinion that an offer of a friendly lift to the Mall is to be turned down politely but firmly.
And yet some people, even those limited to prurience, will check out their neighborhood to see who’s “dirty”. And it may well be false, and the fellow giving your kids a lift may still be a level III sex offender, but off the map. Too much and too little and too questionable, yet still with the potential to do harm.
Oh, a huge potential. At some point, some idiot is going to do something like running over Bob Smith the slightly-creepy-looking-but-harmless pants salesman think that he’s Bob Smith the convicted baby rapist.
…the fellow giving your kids a lift may still be a level III sex offender, but off the map.
Absolutely. Anybody who lets the presence (or absence) of a known threat blind him to the possibility of the presence of an unknown threat is a fool; whatever kind of fool I am, it’s not that kind.
That said, I haven’t yet worked out what the right balance is between teaching kids reasonable caution and excessive caution, although I hope I’m not too far off.
This kind of thing is already here. The question is, how to deal with it?
Many courts (including the courts in my county) have this information online. Not only can you see the names, DOB, race, you can sometimes see the related documents and a history. There was quite an uproar at first. The site was shut down once or twice. But the cat was out of the bag. Now many if not most of the documentation is locked but you can still see much.
As for sex offenders, you can check these out through your state or local law enforcement sites. They are almost useless to me because they don’t give enough information. It’s hard to tell what the offense was, for example (partying with a 17-year-old they thought was 19, or giving a 4-year-old candy and making off with them in a car? It doesn’t elaborate!). Everyone’s a sex offender!
I have heard one complaint about the sex offender sites, though. An official from one state told me their site gets lots of hits. Primary users are people who are looking for service providers. (Photos of the offenders appear on the site.) So that’s one result you might not have considered.
There are several Scott Greenfields, various middle names and initials if any, one a larceny in CT who I guess is about your age.
Wow a lot of Kathleen Caseys! None of them is me!
They’re all me. I use many aliases, but only change the middle initial so I don’t forget the name.
Heeheeheeheee. Dry, very dry.
If these individuals have served time or paid fines, or simply made amends, it’s shameful for voyeuristic type individuals to search out dirty info on their neighbors.
I don’t think that much good can come from a site like this, but much mischief surely can. Like others who have commented above, I just stuck my name [without my middle initial “A”] in their search window, asking for All States, and there were no results.
It ends up the zero result is a false positive, as I learned last year (thanks to following a Google link from my weblog’s Stat Page), that there is a “David E. Giacalone” in Massachusetts, who is a level 3 sex offender (aggravated rape in 1985). As I said at f/k/a last year: “He is 42 years old. I do not know Mr. Giacalone, did not know he existed until two minutes ago, and have no reason to believe that we are related. (The fact that he is 6 feet tall, weighs 214 pounds, and has a relatively small forehead, suggests we have no blood relationship.)”
Should any future blind date or a fiancee’s father ever use criminalsearches.com, it is nice to know I’ll come up clean, despite the felon in MA.
To be honest, I almost wish you didn’t give that site the publicity, Scott, but I understand that this is Sweeps Week.
Sweet…well said…please do no objectify me because you can read what the justice system and police say about me…please get to know me…and you may find the truth….
Like the police department’s computerized crime map, this site works both ways. If I want to score some coke for my 70’s revival party, it looks like Jaime down the street is the man to see. I’ll bet if I look around I could find hookers and gun dealers too. They’d be crazy to sell to someone who approaches them out of the blue, but then these are the one who got caught…
And yet, EVERYONE has to know where all of the sex offenders live… Is this the mysteria attached to the registry, the offenders listed, or just the sick population of the US that gets off on knowing that they are “better” than the next guy. Personally, when the next civil war occurs the owners of sites just like criminalsonline or perverted-justice will be the first to get a bullet from me
Safer or Sicker: A Peek into your Neighbor’s Lives
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