It's been done in almost every market. They're your neighbors. They teach your children. And they're convicted sex offenders.
So when we were working on the sex offender notification process for Texas a few months back, the question of how to do the story in a different way came up. I sent an open records request to the Department of Public Safety to find out exactly how many sex offenders were living in the greater Houston area. In Harris County alone, it turned out we had 1,058 registered offenders since 1995. Then the bells went off. Why not get the state's database containing the names and locations of all registered sex offenders? We sent our request but found out the state only had the information on paper because they had only recently started converting to computer records. So we decided to test our computer-assisted skills.
Offender overload
We called the state and told them to send us each sex offender's registration form. That would have been 20,000 documents, so we settled for Harris County records. A week later we had more than 1,000 forms.
We entered the information into an Excel worksheet. With the help of some associate producers and interns, we spent about a week entering each person's name, date of birth, street of residence, city of residence, ZIP code, and nature of offense. It took us about a week to enter and double-check the data for typos.
The next step was moving the data to Access. God, Microsoft made this easy! I imported the data into a new database using the column headings as the field names.
Scanning for specifics
Now that we had a solid database, we had to find out exactly where these criminals were living. We wanted to find specifics for the story, so we ran a count of the number of sex offenders in each ZIP code. We were even able to figure out the total numbers living on any given street in a ZIP code.
We also wanted to learn which crime occurred most frequently. We ran a count of each type of crime and discovered that indecency with a child was the most prevalent. Using the techniques from before, we also had the most common sex crime in a given location.
With the data needed for the broadcast version of the story already in hand, we wanted to take the story further and give viewers something to use on an "as-needed" basis. So we created a pamphlet based on the database. Figuring viewers would want to know exactly how many sex offenders were living in their neighborhood, we sorted the data by ZIP code. How to make the list reader-friendly? Access is great for creating reports. We designed a standard report with the Access wizard, used the reports design mode to change its look, and added an explanation for how to read the data, a legal disclaimer, and our investigator's logo.
But what about viewers wanting to check whether a particular person was on the list but didn't know where he or she lived? No problem. We saved the database as an *.html file and posted it on our Web site. We repeated sorting the data by different fields. Now viewers could on and run a search by name, city, ZIP code, offense or date of birth. Mission accomplished.
The Aftermath
The sex offender story was a great success. To date we have received numerous requests for a copy of the pamphlet and our Web site receives thousands of hits. The database continues to be updated. With each new registered sex offender, we simply add their information into a new record. In addition, I created a viewing for the rest of the newsroom. Our staff can run searches of the database in a read-only environment without damaging the data. The whole project took about three weeks. And the hardest part was the data entry!
Matt Goldberg can be reached at (713)778-4843 or by email at news2matt@aol.com