MARTINSBURG - The West Virginia State Police will soon be able to keep a closer eye on registered sex offenders in the state thanks to a grant recently received by the law enforcement agency to develop a sex offender mapping system.
The agency announced that it received the $30,000 grant from the West Virginia Technical Assistance Broadband Grant Program to develop the law enforcement sex offender mapping program. The award was part of a solicitation offered by the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, which oversees the West Virginia Broadband Mapping Program. The mapping program will offer troopers a quick method to identify all sex offenders within a given region by making inquiries to the mapping system.
"It's going to be a law enforcement-only database for us to more quickly identify sex offenders in a given area. Where this comes in handy has to do with time frames and instances such as child abductions. One of the first leads we would investigate in a child abduction are sex offenders who may live in proximity to an abduction site," said Lt. D.B. Swiger, who heads the West Virginia State Police Crimes Against Children Unit.
Swiger said statistically and historically, cases involving child abductions often involve a convicted sex offender. The new mapping system will help police to gather information much more quickly and efficiently than the method that's in place now.
"Basically the way it is right now, the way we manage records for sex offender compliance is kind of outdated. Each detachment keeps a file cabinet with the sex offenders listed in alphabetical order by the month of their birthday," said West Virginia State Police Sgt. D.E. Boober.
Boober is one of four troopers in the Eastern Panhandle area assigned to the crimes against child unit.
"Say for instance there was a child abduction in downtown Martinsburg and we quickly want to find all the different sex offenders living within a two-mile radius. The way it stands right now, we have to manually go through all the files not knowing who was there and it would be time-intensive," Boober said.
Swiger said there are currently more than 3,000 registered sex offenders living in the state, and the number grows every year. The West Virginia State Police online sex offender registry, publicly available on the agency's website, currently lists 3,645 offenders when searched by all counties.
Boober said that, locally, there are about 300 registered sex offenders registered in the Berkeley County area; however, he said, that number is substantially less for Jefferson and Morgan counties. Search results using the state police online registry produced 171 results for Berkeley County; 29 results for Morgan County; 74 results for Jefferson County; 431 results for Kanawha County; 85 results for Ohio County; 61 results for Marshall County; 201 results for Wood County; 201 results for Cabell County; 59 results for Wayne County; 122 results for Monongalia County; 136 results for Raleigh County; and 80 results for Randolph County.
Some of the state's largest cities are located in those counties. Results for the online registry include both resident and non-resident offenders. Non-resident offenders include convicted sex offenders who may not live in a particular county, but may work, visit or go to school in those counties.
The new mapping system will have the capability to search for sex offenders within a given radius of a particular address. The program will also provide troopers with vastly more information than is available on similar public mapping systems.
"There's only a certain amount of information that's mandated to be reported to the public, and some of that information won't always be as accurate as what we're going to have because we're going to use GPS coordinates to map these individuals," said Swiger. "It will not only populate the map for us, but the program will export those files to where we'll be able to print them separately and hand them to investigators right on the scene. As it stands now, that's not something we would be able to do with any program that we have."
Boober said it will also help police perform compliance checks to make sure that sex offenders are not in violation of the registry's rules. Under state law, sex offenders are required to register every year at the state police detachment nearest where they reside. Sex offenders are also required to update any changes in their registry information, such as a change of address, within 10 days.
"During our compliance checks, we've found that over a third of our offenders are in non-compliance. In other words, they've had some type of violation. Unfortunately, we just don't have the manpower right now to do periodic checks. The compliance checks that we did were done through overtime funding and grant funding," Swiger said.
Swiger said that in the future the mapping system could also be used for other means, such as identifying crime trends or areas that have a high concentration of vehicle fatalities for statistical and policing purposes.
The West Virginia State Police partnered with West Virginia University through the WV3C (West Virginia Cyber Crime Cooperative) to develop the new mapping program. The law enforcement agency hopes to have a working product available by July.
- Staff writer Edward Marshall can be reached at 304-263-8931, ext. 182.
