politics

Saying more than a thousand released sex offenders have slipped out of state sights, Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Tuesday said names and photographs of those who fail to update their addresses will soon be posted on a government website.

"These offenders pose a potential safety risk to Minnesota communities," he said in announcing "a large-scale, statewide effort" to locate and apprehend nearly 1,400 people.

Pawlenty also favors greatly expanding an existing state online sex offender site to include all of Minnesota's registered sex offenders, a policy that could result in posting 17,000 names and photos, said spokesman Brian McClung. Currently, Minnesota posts on the Depart of Corrections website data on about 100 released sex offenders considered mostly likely to commit more sex crimes.

Posting all sex offenders would bring Minnesota in line with Iowa, Wisconsin and North Dakota.

The Star Tribune reported this month that those neighboring states post information on nearly all of their sex offenders on the Web and that Minnesotans currently have an easier time locating out-of-state offenders living in their neighborhoods than finding nearby Minnesota offenders.

Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, a member of the Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee, said posting 17,000 offenders seems excessive given that most of them were classified by state authorities as posing low or medium risk for committing more sex crimes.

And she questioned the effectiveness of posting identities of roughly 1,400 people with unverified addresses.

"If we don't know where they are, we aren't going to alert the public to their whereabouts," Berglin said.

Broader changes face hurdles

In announcing the effort to find nearly 1,400 sex offenders, Pawlenty said that many have failed to respond to annual inquiries from the state seeking verification of their addresses and other information. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) mails a verification form to the offender's last reported address.

Under current law, data about the offender may be made available to the public if the form is not signed and returned to the BCA in 10 days. A person who knowingly violates any provision of the registration law or provides false information to law enforcement may face felony charges.

McClung said the decision to post offenders who can't be located wasn't triggered by any immediate event but grew out of an ongoing effort to improve public data about sex offenders. Those whose whereabouts are unknown will be posted on a website run by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, with a link from the Department of Corrections site.

"This effort will engage the public and call to action criminal justice professionals statewide to bring this group of offenders into compliance," the governor said.

The Department of Public Safety will provide an unspecified amount of overtime pay until the end of the current fiscal year to help local law enforcement get the effort underway, according to the governors office.

Going further and expanding Web postings to include the roughly 17,000 sex offenders would publicize data about those whose addresses have been verified and who are not considered a high risk of reoffending.

Such a policy would need to withstand potential legal challenges by offenders who had agreed to plead guilty to crimes partly in exchange for not having their identities and locations revealed to the general public, said McClung.

And some within the Department of Corrections have doubts about the effectiveness of posting 17,000 names, worrying that website viewers would have a difficult time sorting out truly dangerous offenders from those deemed unlikely to reoffend.

"I think it's probably going overboard," said Berglin, who said keeping such a long list accurate would be difficult. "It seems it would be very time-intensive to keep this website updated."