"Perpetually Promising Peace of Mind and Prosperity"
That's the slogan of Vision 20/20, an online service (using technology called a Mashup) that offers online map-related services. Most notably this includes a geographical search for registered sex offenders in your immediate area. I tried this with our address, just to see how it worked. Not well. The Minnesota Dept. of Corrections (slogan: "Contributing to a Safer Minnesota") lists six Level 3 Offenders in our zip code, including one a block from our house. Vision 20/20 listed five offenders, but none actually in our zip code. There was no overlap between the two lists, so I don't know where they're getting they're information from if not from the DOC. It's certainly not as impressive as ChicagoCrime.org, where you can sign up for a feed of crimes happening near any city address--it's linked to a publicly available police database.
With our house languishing on the market the last few months, I've been thinking about maps like these. I posted a few weeks ago about the foreclosure, or crime maps that Minneapolis has on its city website. There's some value to these--particularly for citizens seeking information about crime patterns in the city. Yet, as Vision 20/20s slogan suggests, they also allow people to steer clear of potentially dangerous people--giving us "peace of mind" about our neighborhood so we can be truly "prosperous." And so, while we live in a great house on a relatively quiet section of a poor neighborhood, people are scared to live here because bad things do occasionally happen around us.
As a Christian, though, my reading of the gospels shows another mindset. Jesus didn't look at the maps to find the safest place to live. He chose the "dangerous" neighborhood. He didn't avoid "dangerous" characters--he sought them out. When all these maps do is instill fear and create segregated communities, they run counter to the purpose of the church: reconciliation and peace-making.