Detective Corporal Afton White, a sex offender registration officer with the Odessa, Texas Police Department, uses JusticeXchange® to monitor and post watches for registered sex offenders within the city limits. The watches are set up to coincide with the sex offenders’ registration requirements. If an offender registers every 90 days, White creates the watch to expire in three months so he will be notified of the watch expiring, which also serves as a reminder that the offender is due to register.

White’s department also conducts two Registration Enforcement Apprehension Prosecution (REAP) operations twice a year, in which every registered sex offender in the county is contacted during a five-hour period. He performs a search in JusticeXchange for all registered sex offenders prior to the operation to determine whether they have been arrested by any outside agencies to prevent wasting time looking for them if they are currently in custody.

Appriss also partners with Watch Systems to offer a suite of essential tools for day-to-day sex offender management, including:

Offender Watch® – the industry standard sex offender registration, verification, and community notification tool that allows users to access community information, register for e-mail alerts about sex offenders’ movements, and use radial mapping to view offenders’ addresses;

A Booking Alert feature that enables law enforcement agencies to be automatically notified if a registered sex offender is booked into jail virtually anywhere in the country; and

An Active Contact module that automates the monitoring and management mechanism to send notifications to offenders based on the classification level of requirements for re-registration and other purposes.

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These cases have ignited a debate about whether sex offender registries are effective in helping law enforcement protect the public and whether they create a false sense of public safety. The truth is, state sex offender registries are the first line of defense for parents, caregivers, and others with a vested interest in children’s safety.

Appriss and Watch Systems partner to offer a comprehensive sex offender solution that has been implemented in 12 states with more to follow. The solution is framed around the OffenderWatch® data collection and community notification tool, which allows jurisdictions across the participating states to register offenders, manage cases, update information to a central state database, and comply with sex offender management laws while providing inter-agency communication. This solution provides an effective means of community notification via a single platform that generates neighborhood maps, automated postcards, and e-mail distributions.

At the county level, more than 30 communities throughout California rely on OffenderWatch to manage their sex offender populations, and have reported major successes with the use of the system. In San Bernadino County, for instance, OffenderWatch has helped the officers conduct compliance sweeps, bringing the out-of-compliance rate below 10 percent. Jim Black, program coordinator for the sheriff’s Crimes Against Children division, said only 1.7 percent of offenders are not registered.

With these California cases still under investigation, one of the areas states should re-evaluate is the sex offender registry efforts. Are they consistent across jurisdictions? Do they provide optimum levels of data management, compliance, and public access? The Appriss and Watch Systems solution can meet all of these functions.

As the national dialogue about sex offender registries continues, it’s important to keep in mind that no single tool will protect communities from sex offenders. Instead, law enforcement professionals, legislators, caregivers, and other stakeholders should take a comprehensive approach to sex offender management. Registries should be a key component of that approach because they put the power of information directly into the hands of the public to protect their families.