Worth reading today is an unnerving report from Independence Institute’s Todd Shepherd that asserts registered sex offenders could be living with or near state-sanctioned providers of child care.
Shepherd posted his report for the Independence Investigates website earlier today.
He’s been working on the piece for more than a year, and discovered that it could be possible that as many as 25 sex offenders could be living in or near the taxpayer-subsidized facilities.
Beyond his findings, which I’ll not poach here (so click on the link and read them there), I find another aspect of this story compelling.
Shepherd’s journey toward publication broke from the expected. He’s put it up unfinished.
After a geo-coding expert did the work of matching a database of the addresses of registered sex offenders with a database containing the more than 4,000 addresses of those who provide child care for the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program, Shepherd intended to confirm – address by address – what was actually going on.
Instead, he’s published an incomplete report, declined to name names, and turned over his findings to Human Services.
“I wanted to go out and check with shoe leather,” Shepherd told me. “There was just this one house and it scared the hell out of us.”