A Database of Horrors

The notices came home from school with the kids. No need to get alarmed, they said, alarmingly. Merely a reminder. Exercise caution. Reports of attempted child abductions in your area.

This was maybe a month and a half ago, not long before the last day of school. Outside, the air was warm with the smell of jasmine and swimming pools. Children skateboarded down the sidewalk, dawdled unattended at the curb.

Child abductions? Whose children? Where? What did they mean, “your area”? This was around the time that little boy in Beaumont had been kidnapped and killed. Was there a connection? Was this hysteria?

Parents panicked. Police were called. Room moms huddled at the nursery schools. An ice cream truck had been heard, tinkling through the warm afternoons. Who was driving it? What about the man who lived alone down the block? What was the story with him?

The fear lasted probably two weeks before the local paper revealed that the reports had actually come from the suburb next door. Negligible as it was, that little distance changed everything--just a few long blocks of Taco Bells and ranch houses like ours, but still it hadn’t happened here.

In fact, at some level, it was almost as if hadn’t happened at all. When the police made themselves available that week at the elementary school, a lot of people didn’t go. Life had resumed. We could crack our windows open again at night. No need to get alarmed.

*

Preparedness is a funny thing. There’s only so much of it a soul can stand. The problem with bracing for the worst is, you have to imagine it first. And it’s hard to love life amid a cavalcade of worst-case scenarios.

Comes now the new Megan’s Law CD-ROM of registered sex offenders, listing every human worst-case scenario in “your area.” You go to your local police station, punch in your ZIP Code, and up come their names--flashers, pedophiles, rapists, brutal sickos, dirty old men.

There are 63,920 of them in California that authorities know about. The good news is that there’s a huge margin for error in the head count; some 40% of those could turn out to be dead, moved or back behind bars. The bad news is that, on the face of it, they represent one out of every 150 grown men in the state--an epidemic of reasons to get alarmed.

Twenty thousand in Los Angeles County. Three thousand in Orange County. Seven hundred thirty-three in the pristine boondocks of bucolic Shasta County, where there are more per capita than anywhere in the state. Seven in posh Beverly Hills 90210. Sixty-seven in my suburban ZIP Code. More than you’d expect, I guarantee, in yours.

Frightening stuff. Enough to send you on a run to the local substation with a note pad and a photographic memory.

Or not. Strange, how repellent it feels to know--actually know--the scope of the unthinkable, even if only a few months ago, you were seeing a child molester in every van.

No wonder people aren’t flocking to look at this stuff, even if it is, by cop standards, straightforward and easy to use. Spiffy graphics. Good pictures. A far cry from the dogeared dockets the criminal justice system usually dishes up.

A click of the mouse, and there they are, the enemy, albeit without their home addresses. They look, with only a few exceptions, like the guy next door, as surprised as you are that they’re there.

I clicked and clicked. Sixty-seven potential fliers waiting to get sent home with the kids. Sixty-seven reasons to get alarmed. But the more I clicked, the blanker I felt. It was like looking at a map of those fault lines that riddle and undermine the West Coast.

The risk was so huge that it wouldn’t compute. My mind went on overload. Finally, an affable sex-crimes detective ushered me out. Something to think about, he said. Yes, and something to put out of your mind.

*

Walking out, the detective shared a story. Some years ago, he said, he had moved to an impeccable subdivision in the far reaches of Orange County, only to learn that one of these guys lived just blocks away. The strangest thing, he said, was his reaction: He was surprised. He, who, more than anyone, knows that trouble is everywhere.

But it isn’t strange, really. Denial sustains us. Where would we be if we had to admit our “suburbs” are just clearings in an urban jungle? What would we do without our precious distance that changes everything?

Better to put it out of your mind. Forget the coyotes in the canyons, the criminals in the cul-de-sac. Shelve the maps of the fault lines and the databases of sick minds.

Pull off the freeway. The bougainvillea and ivy will close like a magic curtain behind you. Home safe in your area. No reason to get alarmed.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com