There's been a fair amount of discussion on the site (and in our offices) about the practice of posting neighborhood stories alerting that a registered sex offender had moved into a neighborhood.
As a result of that discussion, we've decided to suspend that practice for the time being and to remove the few that we had posted already. (Note, we're leaving the headlines and removing the photos and copy so that the comment debate on this can remain live.)
I realize that at first brush, that may seem inconsistent with our policy of not changing history. And I'm still not swayed that the posting of such announcements as neighborhood news alerts is not in the public interest.
But there are enough potential problems in executing this service properly that we need to retrench before it is both fair and useful: For one, we are relying on secondary sources and don't have the manpower to verify every alert independently. Secondly, although we'd been led to believe otherwise, it turns out that not all the primary sources report in the same fashion or on the same timetable.
We're still committed to providing all the potentially useful information we can find on our local community and helping people parse that in ways that are meaningful. But we're also committed to doing things right. I imagine that this feature will return in the future, hopefully expanding to other forms of public safety information.
I appreciate the many folks who have rung in on this issue -- and particularly the sage advice of our content partner Scott Henson from Grits for Breakfast.
Comments
Billusa99 Anonymous
Good for you!
1 year, 4 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
terryorze Anonymous
I have looked them up on the internet before, and found them nearby. When I checked myself, I never found that the offender had ever been there. Is that the reason that you stopped posting these?
1 year, 4 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
Mike Orren Staff
No Terry, it wasn't. It was for the reasons I detailed above.
1 year, 4 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
Post a comment
(Requires free PegasusNews.com account.)