by Alexis Simendinger

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement had almost given up hope of locating a convicted sex offender it had traced to Illinois before the trail went cold. Illinois investigators thought the man was dead, but Florida found him alive in Indiana last year and arrested him—not for a new sex crime but for failing to register in both Florida and Indiana as a sex offender.

Likewise, Alabama police were hunting for Danny Lewis Smith, a suspect in a series of burglaries. Coincidentally, his rap sheet included a conviction for a sex offense. Police located Smith an hour away and had him apprehended by U.S. marshals— initially not for the burglaries but for violating the state law requiring convicted sex offenders to register their whereabouts with local authorities. As it turned As it turned out, it wasn’t door-todoor, shoe-leather sleuthing that helped investigators capture these “missing” felony suspects; it was a high-tech fusion of information using new computer search tools refined by LexisNexis that enabled law enforcement officers to track them down. The data company’s tracing effort focuses on the estimated 560,000 convicted sex offenders living, working, and moving around the country.

LexisNexis would like to become the pre-eminent private-sector partner in tracking known sex offenders, in much the same way that the National Security Agency is identified with the hunt for terrorists—as an intelligence clearinghouse capable of connecting elusive dots.

As a practical matter, hunting for sex offenders—everyone from Internet porn shoppers to much-publicized (and rare) violent sexual predators— has become a growth industry because of registration laws in every state and law enforcement’s enthusiasm for data fusion.

The special advanced search engines, access to which LexisNexis has sold to Alabama and Florida and is now pitching to others states, including Arizona, California, and Mississippi, were “built for law enforcement [and] bring together approximately 9,000 data sources from all over the country,” said Brendan Peter, the company’s special services senior director for industry affairs in Washington.

“All of our data is regulated under open-records statutes, which are very, very different from state to state,” Peter explained during a recent demonstration in a conference room bare except for a poster warning staff to safeguard confidential information. The company’s software enables individual jurisdictions to fuse “data sets,” even information maintained within states, “to give them a more global picture of an individual,” Peter said.

LexisNexis products, for instance, can visually map correlations between missing children and convicted sex offenders at known addresses, as well as those who may have resided in the area at one time. The maps can pinpoint the location of known child molesters in relation to schools and other places frequented by children.

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