Neighborhood Watch is part of an online service that allows folks to check for sexual offenders and other criminals living in their neighborhood – or the area surrounding school, the park, Grandma’s house. The Intelius site also offers reverse cell phone searches as well as free people searches through their iSearch product. In addition to Intelius’s data search service, the free iSearch.com search engine allows you to quickly and easily uncover information about anyone.
But it’s the sexual offender search that we Bloghers (click for a roundup of some amazing blogging women giving feedback on this same product) are assigned to review. I think some others are reviewing background search cababilities... as in, your potential new renters or boyfriends or, better yet, your DAUGHTER's potential boyfriend.
I'm assigned to look at the Neighborhood Watch product.
This feels like a serious responsibility.
You might know from my Farm Suite musings that I’m mom to four girls. You might further imagine that my husband and I are protective of our daughters – and in this you’d be dead right. Even before our first girl was born, we were diligent to check police records on the neighborhood in which we bought our first home. We did our best, we did.
We talked to neighbors who had young children. We read the statistics. Maybe 10 years ago there weren’t any readily available ways to search the sexual offender registries. I don’t know, but I know we didn’t specifically search for that. The internet was newish, and we weren’t yet parents. We were satisfied with the information we uncovered. It took hours, and digging, and driving, and phone calls.
I learned a lot more in three minutes with Intelius than I did all those hours on my own.
Bear in mind, my education and career path have heavy doses of investigative journalism. I know the places to look. But immediately upon loading my current address, Intelius let me know:
“Intelius is searching billions of current utility records, court records, county records, change of address records, property records, business records, and other public and publicly available information to find what you’re looking for.”
That was reassuring to me.
My initial Intelius search, in which I entered our home address, did not reveal any concerns within five miles of our current home. Granted, we live in a fairly remote rural village. I was relieved by this information... but was it truly "information" ... could I trust that Intelius would find such a threat if it had existed in my area?
For my next search I entered the address of an investment property we own. The house is 12 or 13 miles away from us in a small town. This Intelius search answered my question when it came back with several folks who have scary criminal records who were reported to be living within blocks of that house.
This valuable step, upon further investigation, revealed to me that it must be important with the Intelius product to search surrounding zip codes to one’s home; although the search of my home address hadn’t revealed any nearby offenders, this second search did show me a person of interest (I’m not sure of his actual crime – the site did allow me to download individual records, but I didn’t do so) who evidently lives just two miles away from our farm. That’s essential information to me since my daughters and I ride horses on trails very close to his address.
To understand why this offender didn’t appear in my first search, you should know that my zip code and that of our rental are different. Had I not performed the second search I would not have discovered my neighbor’s potentially threatening criminal history.
It seemed from my experience with the product that Intelius does a very thorough search of public “and publicly available” documents. If my girls were attending school, I’d be sure to enter that address for a search as well.
Often in the course of my real estate career I referred buyers to the police department crime records and other online sex offender tracking sites, which to my knowledge relied solely on mandatory reporting of addresses for those who are still under a probation or parole officer's watch. The Intelius product appears to compile many records to go further than a simple police record search.
The Intelius Neighborhood Watch product takes the difficulty out of the vital step of checking the safety of a neighborhood -- whether it's one you're considering or one in which you plan to remain.
