Whereabouts of sex offenders unknown

"A third of Port Orchard's sex offenders are unaccounted for following a recent Port Orchard police location effort and police have forwarded their names to the prosecutor's office for arrest for failure to register.A Port Orchard Police Department reserve officer found 18 of Port Orchard's 27 registered sex offenders, but the locations of the other nine are unknown. One man might have left the state.The police department filed reports on the missing nine offenders with the prosecutor's office for failing to register their current whereabouts with the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office. State law requires sex offenders to register their addresses with the county sheriff's office each time they move. Until last year, one Kitsap County Sheriff's detective was responsible for keeping track of the whereabouts of all 523 sex offenders in the county.Because the workload was overwhelming to sheriff's offices statewide - and the state mandate to register sex offenders was unfunded - the legislature changed the law to allow sheriff's offices to forward the registrations of sex offenders living within city limits to chiefs of police.The Port Orchard Police Department has been checking up on the city's registered sex offenders every six months, but Sgt. Mark Duncan said the department is preparing to switch to quarterly monitoring to make sure they're living where they say they're living.They're getting around the patrol officers' existing time crunch by assigning the project to reserve officers. The reserve officers are doing it - they're doing a superb job, Duncan said. The first time, we had to have officers try to track them down between calls. It wasn't efficient.There are currently 27 convicted sex offenders living in Port Orchard, including the nine who have failed to register with the sheriff's office. There is one Level III sex offender, seven Level II sex offenders and 19 Level I sex offenders. Level One offenders are perpetrators of the least serious sex crimes and are considered least likely to reoffend. That there is only one Level III offender - the level considered most likely to reoffend - living in Port Orchard is remarkable. Statistically, that's low, Duncan said. "

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