By now, you may have heard that after Hurricane Katrina, an estimated 2,000 registered sex offenders relocated to new states; and that many of them are not re-registered, as required by law. This is important because anonymity makes it easier for them to re-offend. This post-Katrina sex offender ID story from Associated Press is circulating at online news sites today, and includes a tidbit in the last graf that's seemingly damning of FEMA and the Bush administration:

Florida officials wrote to FEMA in mid-December requesting information on evacuated sexual offenders who may have relocated in Florida during the past year's hurricanes. The state has yet to get a response on its request.

They're fingering the wrong Bush, or at least skating past some shared responsibilities. Here's more from the Bradenton Herald:

"I am greatly concerned that known sex offenders who may have relocated to your state may take advantage of their anonymity and harm children once again," Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a Nov. 28 letter to (Florida Gov. Jeb) Bush.

The letter included an attachment that outlined how state law-enforcement agencies could request the FEMA records. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (ed. - a.k.a. "FDLE") made such a request in mid-December, but has yet to get a reply, a spokesman said Friday. "We can't do anything until we get those names," spokesman Tom Berlinger said. "We're on standby waiting for further action."

That might be because FDLE sought information that it was supposed to supply. The Nov. 28 attachment said that law-enforcement agencies, in their requests, must provide a list of people that they are interested in. But FDLE asked FEMA for ". . . a listing of those persons who have registered as sex offenders in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and any other affected state who have relocated to a Florida residence as a result of hurricane evacuation."

So Florida waited at least two weeks after receiving notification to make the information request to the feds, and then failed to follow the stated guidelines. With the feds expecting to be reviewing requests from dozens of states seeking information about potential relocated sex offenders in the wake of Katrina, it seems pretty reasonable for the feds to ask the states themselves to provide the sub-databases of potential suspects. How hard is it for Florida to get the list of registered sex offenders from a few other southeastern states, and then provide those names to the feds for cross-checking against FEMA data on Katrina relocatees to Florida? Granted that won't produce the name of each registered sex offender relocatee sought, but it's a good start.

The Bradenton Herald smokes AP by getting closer to the bottom of the Florida foul-up, rather than settling for a cheap intimation of FEMA negligence. Granted there's been a fair amount of that to go around in other instances. But still. If you're going to pile on, do your homework.

That's the thing about being able to quickly review multiple versions of the same news story via services such as Google News. You can see who's half-stepping it, and how errors of omission - among various sorts of errors newspapers regularly make - reflect bias.

AP: there's a copy editor somewhere who settled for lazy reporting on the Florida piece of the story, most likely because he or she thought the George W. Bush administration just must be to blame, as usual.

Get me re-write!

TECHNORATI TAGS: KATRINA, SEX OFFENDERS, FLORIDA, ASSOCIATED PRESS, BRADENTON HERALD

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at December 31, 2005 12:39 PM