By Jessie-Lynne Kerr
The Times-Union

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, working with information industry leader LexisNexis, has begun using a new advanced investigative solution to more quickly respond to child abductions and locate and monitor noncompliant sex offenders.

Jim Peck of Boca Raton, chief executive officer of LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group, which is announcing the launch of the solution today, said in a telephone interview Tuesday it is a valuable tool law enforcement can use to track down sex offenders.

Statistics he cited show there are 600,000 sex offenders in the United States, but 100,000 of them do not register as required by law.

Florida is home to 33,280 registered sex offenders as of Nov. 3, the fourth-largest sex offender population behind California, Texas and Michigan.

"When a child is abducted," Peck said, "time is of the essence. In 75 percent of the cases where the child is killed, it happens within three hours of the abduction, and 40 percent of the time kids are abducted they are murdered."

Sex offenders, since they are required to register with law enforcement, tend to move across state borders in an attempt to become anonymous again, Peck said.

"We can let law enforcement know when sex offenders move into their area and are not registered," Peck said.

How?

LexisNexis combs through public records across the nation to learn who the convicted sex offenders are, where they were convicted, their aliases, Social Security numbers, photos, physical descriptions and even where their relatives and associates live, he said. They also compile information from such public records as mortgage applications, utility and rental deposits.

"They ultimately get into our system," Peck said, "and our system is able to distinguish between an innocent person and a sexual predator who happen to have the same names."

If a child is taken, authorities enter the ZIP code of the abduction's location and get a list of all the registered and unregistered sex offenders in the area.

The system gives law enforcement leads, but it doesn't trump old-fashioned legwork.

"They still have to go out and knock on doors," Peck said, "but we can lead them to the right doors."

Mary Coffee, the FDLE administrator over the career offender and sex offender/predator registration, said any law enforcement agency in Florida can use the solution because the state agency maintains a closed network with all criminal justice agencies in Florida.

"It has been a big benefit looking for absconders, and it has helped us locate more than 1,300 sexual offenders who failed to register," she said.

LexisNexis has provided FDLE with many leads. In one case, Coffee said, a man wanted in Florida had been released from jail in another state but Florida lost track of him.

"We used the LexisNexis solution and were able to obtain some alias identification for the man and used that to track the criminal history he built using that alias," Coffee said. "He is now back in jail for failing to register in Florida."

Tom Joyce, a retired New York City Police Department detective, is an account executive for law enforcement with Peck's LexisNexis group.

"Instead of waiting for tips to come in, investigators can be proactive," Joyce said. "As a retired detective, this is very exciting for me. I wish I had it when I was on the job."

Read article at The Florida Times-Union web site.