Non-Compliant Sex Offenders

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By Lena Vargas

Summary

Take a look at the state's sex offender database and you'll see lots of offenders listed as "non-compliant". This means authorities don't know where they are. But the database doesn't tell the whole story.

Story Published: Mar 9, 2010 at 7:15 PM PST

Non-Compliant Sex Offenders
TRI-CITIES---Take a look at the state's sex offender database and you'll see lots of offenders listed as "non-compliant". This means authorities don't know where they are.

Benton County in particular looks alarming with 30 percent of the sex offenders listed as "non-compliant”. But we dug deeper and found the numbers don't tell the whole story because compliant "lesser" offenders are not in the database. If you look at the total number of offenders in the county, the percent of non-compliance is much lower or about five percent. Level I sex offenders are only in the database if they are non-compliant.

Still, 27 sex offenders are unaccounted for in Benton County, including two listed as child rape convicts.

In Franklin County five sex offenders are unaccounted for – including some Level III sex offenders, which are the once considered more likely to reoffend.