Six years ago, Florida lawmakers passed legislation designed to protect kids from child molesters. We used CAR techniques to show that law was a farce. Our WFLA-TV investigation uncovered more than a hundred molesters on probation living close to schools and day care centers in violation of Florida's "1000-foot rule," a measure that's supposed to help separate predators from their prey. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software we mapped one county's population of child molesters to look at their proximity to schools and child-care centers and determined there was a pattern of violations.
We then targeted a few of the worst violators for narrative storytelling. The project began with a phone call last August to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) in Tallahassee, which maintains a database of sex offenders online. The FDLE Web site enables anyone to search for sex offenders by name, address, etc. For our purpose, we needed more information. We asked for the FDLE's raw database so we could correlate offender addresses with schools and day care centers using our GIS software.
FDLE's data managers balked at our initial request so we followed up with a letter. Apparently, we were the first journalists to ask for the underlying data (always an encouraging sign). Within two days, FDLE's legal counsel agreed to release it under Florida's Public Records Law. We received data for thousands of registered sex offenders via e-mail in ASCII delimited text (which we easily converted to a Microsoft Access table).
We also asked for and received a key to explain some of the more confusing fields critical to our project (such as dates of arrest versus dates of offense, codes that indicated victims under 18, and so forth). Step by step, we refined the data using Access software to meet our exact needs: 1) We selected all of the sex offenders living in Pinellas County. 2) We deleted everyone except offenders who had committed crimes against kids.
3) We ordered the data by date of offense and deleted child molesters who had committed offenses before October 1995, when the "1000-foot rule" took effect. 4) We selected only the offenders currently on probation. These four steps gave us an offender database of about 300 individuals precisely matching our purpose. By this time we had already acquired the other two databases needed for our project: The School Board supplied us with the names and street address of every public school in Pinellas County.
The Juvenile Welfare Board sent us the location and operator of every licensed day care center or family-care home. All three databases arrived by e-mail in the form of text tables that were easily imported to Microsoft Access. WFLA-TV Database Manager Rocky Glisson then plotted the most updated address on each of the sexual offenders we'd filtered from the FDLE text file. He also plotted the addresses of each licensed childcare center, and all public schools in Pinellas County.
All of the plotting was done using the MapInfo program. With this software, we could plot the addresses from Microsoft Access directly into MapInfo. Sex offenders in the "red zone" Next, using. MapInfo's radius tool, Glisson determined how many of the sexual offenders were within the 1000 foot "red zone" of any of the day-cares and schools. He found plenty. Out of approximately 300 molesters, Glisson plotted over 100 in apparent violation of Florida law.
Because of the number of violators, the limitations of MapInfo, and Glisson's attention to detail, mapping these offenders became the most tedious and time-con- suming part of the project. Glisson verified by hand any offender that lived near a day-care or school. He repeated the process at least four times to validate his results. Results surprised reporters Those results surpassed our expectations, and established the underlying CAR basis for Mark Douglas's narrative story.
Douglas began putting faces on the data by using the courthouse computer system to locate individual cases. He then manually researched the hard copy case files, with the help of News Videographer Eric Hulsizer and Special Projects Producer Marie Hickman. To simplify the process for the file research team, Douglas created a hard copy form that uniformly noted basic information about each offender for later comparison.
Old fashioned footwork In Florida, court clerks "sanitize" criminal files to remove identification of sex crime victims, especially if they are children. To work around this, we studied the witness lists for related names that often are a tip-off to child-parent relationships, as an indirect way of determining the victims' identity (none of which we revealed in the stories). In the end, we focused more on the criminals, the probation officers who supervised them, and the judges and prosecutors who were supposed to ensure the 1000-foot rule was invoked and enforced.
We also talked to parents, neighbors, educators and day care operators who expressed concern about the system failures our CAR project had uncovered. Measuring the distance. We headed into the neighborhoods located by our MapInfo program, and manually verified the proximity between kids and molesters with a handheld measuring wheel borrowed from our maintenance department. The measuring wheel, which we rolled from point to point, turned out to be a good storytelling device and made our lawyers happy.
Our reporting eventually took us to the Pinellas Sheriff's Office where deputies were testing a new computerized tracking program of their own. We asked them to plug-in the names of some of the sex offenders we'd targeted as a third way to verify our results. Our lawyers loved that, too. Multimedia Our multimedia reports took the form of TV stories, several articles in the Tampa Tribune, and an online map featured on our web site TBO.com.
(http:// ports.tbo.com/reports/nov2000loffendersl) That online graphic enabled viewers to open smaller maps detailing the location of offenders in their neighborhoods relative to schools and day care centers. All three versions of our "convergence" reports on child molesters unfolded five days before Florida's presidential election. Despite the obvious political distractions, the investigation became a Tampa Tribune front-page story, lead our TV newscasts, and hit the AP wire several times.
The public response was pronounced and immediate. Florida Governor Jeb Bush fired off a letter to the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court asking for reforms. The chief circuit judge in Pinellas County took action to fix the loopholes and mistakes that had allowed hundreds of molesters to avoid the 1,000-foot restriction in Pinellas County. Probation officials began searching our online database to correct their own mistakes.
Undeniable proof The use of CAR techniques on this topic delivered undeniable proof of a systematic problem in Florida's criminal justice system. Three months after that first phone call to FDLE, our CAR project coupled with plenty of old-fashioned courthouse research and field reporting generated some compelling stories that helped reform how Florida's justice system manages child molesters. Some tips to follow: Plan well ahead to allow for slow response from the data keepers.
Talk directly to the data managers and ask for information in a form that's easily importable to Access, and whichever GIS program you're using. Make sure you get an accurate data key to eliminate confusion over dates and codes. Consider adding more databases such as school bus stops, parks and pri- vate schools. Make sure you have the most current offender data. Verify with other sources like the Department of Corrections, as this population tends to be transient.
Look for a GIS program that will automatically plot designated radii. As always with a CAR project, be suspicious if your findings look too good to be true. Find other ways to verify the results. Remember, the CAR data may give you supporting data, but let people tell the story. Mark Douglas can be reached by e-mail at mdouglas@wfla.com and Rocky Glisson can be reached at rglisson@wfla.com