Registered Sex Offenders
A glitch on Tennessee’s Sex Offender Registry website could keep you from finding out if a sex offender lives near you.
The problem has to do with aliases listed on sex offenders’ web pages.
News Channel 3 discovered the problem when we talked to Nicole McKinley. She recently found out her longtime boyfriend, also the father of her two children, was not who he claimed to be.
After a recent incident with a four-year old neighborhood girl, McKinley learned her boyfriend, who she knew as “Eddie White” was really a registered sex offender. Memphis police knew him as “Charles Williams.”
According to the registry, Williams has two previous sex offenses on his rap sheet, and uses several aliases, including “Eddie White” and ” Larry Wilson.”
“It’s like I was living with a stranger all these years. You never know who you’re going to come in contact with,” McKinley said.
McKinley’s circumstances revealed the problem with Tennessee’s Sex Offender Registry. The registry is supposed to let you search for sex offenders using their real names, and their reported aliases. Plugging in any of these names should bring you to the same person. It means when News Channel 3 plugged in “Eddie White,” we should have been directed to “Charles Williams” sex offender registry page. That did not happen.
We alerted agents at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, who were not aware of the issue and blame a computer glitch. The bureau says there are different levels of access to the registry. The law enforcement access is working properly. It’s the general public’s side where you have problems researching aliases. The bureau says it is working on the problem and hopes to have it corrected by early next week.
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