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If you have been following the news on cable television or online this morning you have probably already heard about the hanging death of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part time fieldworker for the U.S. Census in Kentucky. According to an Associated Press report, an unnamed law enforcement official said Sparkman's body was found with the word "fed" scrawled on his chest.

Very little about this story has been confirmed by official sources. "Investigators," the story tells us, "are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to [Sparkman's] government job or to anti-government sentiment." So we should take care to avoid jumping to conclusions about the circumstances surrounding Mr. Sparkman's death.

Still, let's remember that a Census "field worker" is really a survey interviewer. As noted this morning by the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe, the Census hires "hundreds of thousands of temporary workers across the country [to] walk door-to-door conducting various demographic surveys." Their work is neither partisan nor political. It is vital to the accurate collection of Census Bureau statistics on the U.S. population and economy.

As my colleague David Hill pointed out a few months ago, accurate Census data has profound importance, not just to the functioning of government, but also to "entrepreneurship, marketing and business planning." He quoted a commercial broker named Howard Carr who once told the Albany Times:

The raw, dry, detailed facts and figures about people that the U.S. government collects every 10 years are the stuff real estate developers live by [and are used by businesses] for everything from determining how many health-conscious products to stock on supermarket shelves to deciding on which side of the street a day-care center should be built.

Last night, SurveyUSA CEO Jay Leve, whose company uses an automated methodology rather than live interviewers, took to the listserv of the American Association of Public Opinion Research with this message: "If Mr. Sparkman's hanging is related to his work for the Census Bureau -- and unclear yet that it is -- this is an attack on each of us, however we collect our data."

Amen to that.