Two kidnapping stories made headlines this week. One in Kentucky and one in Florida. In both cases men tried to kidnap teenage girls.

Both news reports, put out by independent news agencies, seemed surprised that the perpetrators were not on the sex offender’s registry. Miami’s CBS affiliate wrote, “Investigators don’t know why Bonello went after the girl. He’s not a registered sex offender” and The Daily Independent wrote, “Daniels said the church had no reason to believe Spence would pursue an underage girl. Spence is not a registered sex offender”!

There’s a false public perception that the people out there committing sex crimes are registrants and if we know who the registrants are, we’ll prevent sex crimes from occurring. That’s about as dangerous a myth as you can get.

In fact, if there’s a sex crime, you have a better than 9 out of 10 chance that it’s NOT someone on the registry and if you’re so hyper-focused on the close to 900,000 people who are very UNLIKELY to be the suspect, you’re misspending resources on prevention and investigation.

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