Updated May 24, 2010
Sen. Shelby Slams Census Bureau for Allowing Sex
Offenders to Go Door-to-Door
FOXNews.com
After two cases of alleged criminals going door-to-door to take surveys,
Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said Monday that the U.S. Census Bureau must
do more to prevent hiring census takers with a criminal background.
After two cases of alleged criminals going door-to-door to take surveys,
Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said Monday that the U.S. Census Bureau must
do more to prevent hiring census takers with a criminal background.
In a letter to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke sent Monday, Shelby wrote
that when he asked Locke during a Senate hearing last year about
guidelines to disqualify applicants, including sex offenders and people
who've committed crimes against children, he was told the measures would
ensure "each applicant is an acceptable risk to collect census
information from residents of a community as a representative of our
government."
"It is inconceivable that the Census Bureau could be so poorly managed
as to hire a convicted sex offender to go door-to-door to collect
personal information," Shelby said. "Clearly, Mr. Secretary, your
guidelines are not working."
The letter followed news last week that a sex offender in New Jersey had
spent two weeks in May interviewing residents while carrying around an
official Census badge, bag and list of residents who hadn't returned
their surveys.
Frank Kuni reportedly had used fake documents under the name Jamie
Shephard to pass an initial name check and receive four days of
training.
But an alert resident recognized the 47-year-old from the state's
Internet sex offender registry.
Kuni, who was charged with using a fraudulent document to get government
ID, was fingerprinted during his first day of training but when Census
officials learned on the last day of training that Kuni had been flagged
for a previous arrest, he was already out the door with his assignment,
Fernando E. Armstrong, director of the U.S. Census Bureau's Philadelphia
region, told the Courier News.
He was arrested four days later.
"From our perspective, the process that was put in place and has been
used across the country worked in this case," Armstrong told the
newspaper, acknowledging that an earlier return of the background check
would've prevented Kuni from reaching the street.
In a separate case in Indiana, a volunteer census worker named Daniel
Miller allegedly raped and beat a 21-year-old physically handicapped
woman after returning to her home in the middle of the night following
an interview earlier in the day.
Shelby said that during the 2000 Census, one in four of the 930,000
applicants for the temporary jobs were flagged by the FBI and prevented
from working.
"The Census Bureau spent $2.5 million on a Super Bowl advertisement to
encourage participation in the Census and has gone to great lengths to
assure Americans that they should open their doors to Census workers.
The lack of adequate oversight is unacceptable," Shelby wrote.
"What is even more objectionable is that it does not appear from public
statements on the incident that the Census Bureau admits fault or even
acknowledges that their screening procedures are not working," he wrote.
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