ShawneeDispatch.com

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation lists 26 former sex offenders living in Shawnee.

The issue of how to treat and track these offenders comes up time and again, most recently last month in Florida, when 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford was abducted and murdered, and a registered sex offender was arrested for the crime.

Closer to home, the city of Lawrence learned recently that one of its newest residents would be child molester Leroy Hendricks, 70, who was famously quoted as saying the only sure way he'd stop molesting children was if he died.

While local police say they don't have such a drastic case on record, they do keep track of sex offenders living in the city. Shawnee Police Captain Ron Copeland said the city is aware of the names and addresses of all registered sex offenders, as well as any who might move to the city.

"They notify us that the guy's coming from prison to live at an address in our city," Copeland said. "We don't do anything as far as checking on them, but we keep that information available, should we have a crime in that vicinity."

Copeland, who has been with the department for 30 years, said he could not remember a time when an investigation of a sex crime in Shawnee led to a registered sex offender as a suspect.

Last year, the department said 35 sexual offenses were reported in the city, 18 of them rapes, though Copeland said none were "stranger" rapes, where a woman is attacked by an unknown man.

"The bottom line is we don't have a whole great lot of sex crimes of that nature," Copeland said.

However, for cases such as that of Lunsford, Copeland sees the KBI listing as a valuable resource.

Not all the people listed on the state's "offender registry" Internet site, found at www.accesskansas.org/kbi, are sex offenders. The list also includes people convicted of violent crimes including murder, attempted murder and manslaughter. Only one of the 27 offenders listed in Shawnee was not a sex offender.

Under the current state law, however, the site contains only offenders whose crimes were committed after April 1994.

The KBI's list shows that 230 registered offenders live in Johnson County. Using the 2003 population estimate for the county of 486,515, the ratio of population to offenders is 2,115 to 1.

Shawnee's 2003 population estimate of 53,500 equates to one offender to every 2,057 people.

The KBI lists 70 offenders in the county's largest city, Overland Park, and 53 in Olathe. Shawnee neighbors Lenexa and Merriam have 15 and 10 registered offenders, respectively.

The Legislature is considering making the Web site retroactive to convictions as early as 1985, which would roughly double the size of the 3,100-person list.

-- Eric Weslander contributed to this story.