Why stop at ice cream trucks?
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By The Quad-City Times | Saturday, September 06, 2008 |
We’d hoped politicians had wised up to the folly of expanding the sex offender bureaucracy. Now, along comes another politician clambering aboard this tired, old bandwagon. Davenport 2nd Ward Alderman Shawn Hamerlinck has suggested a city ordinance forbidding former sex offenders from working on ice cream trucks.
It seems simple enough, until you think it through. There is one registered ice cream truck company in Davenport. We’ve not heard reports of any harm caused by even one driver. Exhaustive evidence says family members and acquaintances, not stranger danger, are the source of most sexual attacks on children.
Until now, we’ve not viewed Hamerlinck as one who favors excessive government regulation for nonexistent problems. Now he’s running for the state legislature. If elected, he’ll have a boatload of government regulations to pass if he intends to watchdog anyone working around kids. Ice cream truck drivers aren’t the only ones. Hamerlinck will need to regulate pizza delivery drivers who might stop at a family home. Or package delivery drivers. Better make that all truck drivers. Then come:
* Fast-food servers
* Bus drivers
* Convenience store clerks
* Beauticians and barbers
* Any restaurant employee
* Meter readers
* Park maintenance workers
* Disc jockeys
* Any mall employee
* Nurses
* Pediatricians
* Crossing guards
* Newspaper reporters
* And, yes, aldermen
The list of occupations that could come into contact with kids is endless. Regulating each prevents nothing. Crime-minded sex offenders can find victims everywhere.
Iowa’s dangerous and expensive sex offender bureaucracy bans former offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care. As a direct result, the law clusters these former offenders in unlikely places, like the 13 convicted sex offenders living legally within four blocks of Davenport’s most popular library.
While Hamerlinck and others want to expand this useless bureaucracy, we still have an entire, existing criminal justice system that can deal much more effectively with sex offenders, or any lawbreakers. State legislators could easily impose longer sentences and hire more prison guards. They could authorize innovative rehabilitation programs, or simply lock ’em up. They don’t because that requires state appropriations.
Instead, they seem to keep passing laws that shove the problem and expense onto local government and local property taxpayers.
A Davenport alderman has no role to play in expanding the sex offender bureaucracy.
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