{ "id": "2004-june-spotting-sex-offenders", "slug": "2004-june-spotting-sex-offenders", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-spotting-sex-offenders.html", "year": 2004, "month": "June", "monthNum": 6, "headline": "Spotting sex offenders", "kicker": "MAPPING", "author_name": "Tisha Thompson", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "WMAR-Baltimore", "summary": "A Baltimore newsroom used MapPoint software to map over 3,500 sex offenders from the state registry, discovering clusters near schools, though they faced technical challenges incorporating the Windows-based maps into their Mac-based graphics system.", "keywords": [ "mapping", "offenders", "software" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Technology", "Crime & Justice" ], "technologies": [ "Access", "Excel", "MapPoint", "ArcView", "CD-ROM", "Internet", "PDF" ], "full_text": "Nobody wants sex offenders in his or her backyard, and most people lack the technology to see if any live nearby. It's easy enough to go to a sex offender registry on the Web, type in an address and see whether any live on your street. But, since most people are not cartographers, they may not be aware of sex offenders living on streets that wind behind their homes or a block away from a school.\n\nWe initially wanted to see if there were any sex offender clusters (large groups of registered offenders living together in the same neighborhood or at the same address) in Baltimore. We filed a public information request with Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for a CD-ROM containing the state Sex Offender Registry. (See the May/June IRE Journal for more about reporting on sex offenders).\n\nEven though that information is readily available on the Internet in a Portable Document Format file, the department initially didn't want to give us the information. It claimed that because the registry changes every day, any information burned onto a CD would immediately be outdated. But when I responded that I wanted to map the information, the department suddenly became super helpful. \"Our computer guys want to know what you can do with the data,\" they said. And I promised to verify the address of any sex offender we specifically referred to in our story.\n\nI imported the comma-delimited text data into Microsoft Access and Excel. I used Access to find the clusters by sorting and grouping and counting specific addresses and ZIP codes. I used Excel to import the data into MapPoint, a Microsoft mapping program.\n\nWe bought MapPoint instead of ESRI ArcView because it's less expensive ($299 list price) and easier to use. It took me about 10 minutes to somewhat master the software. MapPoint imported the more-than 3,500 sex offender rows from Excel within two minutes, including name, address and offense of each offender. The software already contains the addresses of places such as police departments, libraries, museums and other public buildings. I asked MapPoint to map all school buildings and quickly saw there were clusters located near school buildings.\n\nThe MapPoint address matching process did have some shortcomings. I had to manually approve some addresses because a ZIP code didn't match, a street name was slightly off and so forth. I also noticed a few school names were out of date, even though the addresses were correct. And I realized the software would only mark each location once, so there is no way to tell if several people live at one address without first grouping and summarizing the data.\n\nOur biggest hurdle came when we tried to incorporate the maps into the story. Like many television stations, our graphics department uses Macintosh computers and MapPoint runs on Windows. Our computer guru tried everything he knew, but we were working on deadline. We never were able to figure out how to import the maps I created into the graphics computers.\n\nWe ended up simply shooting the PC screen as I zoomed in and out of the maps in MapPoint. Surprisingly, the video ended up being much more effective than any graphic we could have made. (It wouldn't have worked if our photographer hadn't managed to get rid of that annoying computer flicker). We started with a map of Maryland, then zoomed in to show how densely packed the sex offenders are in Baltimore, zoomed in again to a ZIP code that had more than 100 offenders, and then zoomed in once again to a street where almost a dozen offenders lived in the same residence.\n\nThe maps showed sex offenders living all around Baltimore.\n\nWe did a lot of old-fashioned reporting - verifying addresses, getting court records and finding people. But the red dots on the maps told the story best. Even experienced reporters at our station were surprised at what they saw on the computer screen. Maryland looks like a big, red morass. After zooming in, Baltimore became a glaring red dot. I'm convinced that no single piece of video could have illustrated the statement that \"we found more than 100 living in the same neighborhood\" as well as the map that showed the dots lining a road.\n\nThe maps showed sex offenders living all around Baltimore. Practically everyone in the newsroom - as well as some viewers - asked me to type in their addresses so they could see how many dots were in their neighborhood.\n\nAnd the department's computer staff? They are trying to figure out if they can incorporate the mapping technology onto the Sex Offender Registry's Web site. All of which convinced me that if you have the right kind of story, maps will not only help research, but dramatically enhance storytelling as well.\n\nContact Tisha Thompson by e-mail at Thompson@wmar.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2004-june-sex-offenders", "score": 0.426 }, { "slug": "1998-march-sex-criminals-exposed", "score": 0.328 }, { "slug": "2001-septemberoctober-mapping-molesters", "score": 0.306 }, { "slug": "2004-june-making-a-point-with-geocoding", "score": 0.237 }, { "slug": "2000-julyaugust-repeat-offenders", "score": 0.207 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-spotting-sex-offenders.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-june-spotting-sex-offenders.json" }