Travis Rowley’s weekend column takes up the topic of Swipely CEO Angus Davis versus a proposed downtown parole office.  Travis focuses on the identity-politics response from progressives.

I take a somewhat different view.

Let me stipulate that I’m absolutely certain there are reasons to be cynical and disapproving of this particular choice of location.  But a rich guy not wanting those people near his business is not one of them.

Not putting a stop-in center for convicted rapists next to a women-only gym, or for car thieves next to the airport parking lot, would be one thing.  But simply not wanting people who are marginally attached to the criminal justice system anywhere near a general business-to-business company is less easily justified.

Travis quotes Davis from Dan Yorke’s State of Mind program:

The statistics say that somewhere between 19 and 27 percent of the folks that are served by this office that are on parole or probation are there for a violent offense. And statistics say that 61 percent of those folks are going to commit another offense.

Conspicuously, Davis didn’t offer any more specificity. How much onsite activity does the parole office have, and for whom?  More directly, what do “the statistics say” about crime in the vicinity of a parole office?  I’d be tempted to guess that ex-cons tend to be in a less-recidivist frame of mind while running the errands that keep them out of prison.

But nobody has raised the most important point: People are parolees because they’re presumably not to be an active threat to society, at least to the extent that they are trusted among the large numbers of people waiting for buses even closer to Davis’s office.  If that’s not the case, then fighting over where they check in for a reminder to be on their best behavior is just a test of who has the political clout to keep them at arm’s length.