MISSOULA, Mont. — Members from five agencies took to the streets of Missoula to make sure that sex offenders registered in the city limits are living in compliance with their court ordered restrictions.
In Missoula alone there are a total of 255 registered sex offenders. Last week, the Missoula Police Department, the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department, the U.S. Marshals, the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, and Probation and Parole took to the streets of Missoula to do sex offender checks.
“It is actually a physical face-to-face visit. Detectives or officers will actually be knocking on the door of the offender. If that offender isn’t spoken to and somebody else is there, we’ll confirm that they are actually at the address that they register, by going to their place of work. Most of those compliance checks are done in the evening hours so people are off work, and we try to be face-to-face with them. A phone call with them claiming that they live there does not suffice,” said Detective Lieutenant Eddie McLean with the Missoula Police Department.
Sex offenders register through the county at the sheriff’s office. There is both a city and county registry where they break things up when they are doing compliance checks.
“All offenders are required to comply with any court restrictions that are placed on them. When we end up getting a case on a non-compliant offender, that is assigned to a detective who will investigate that case and refer it to the county attorney’s office for prosecution and they will make the sentencing recommendation based on the lack of compliance,” said Lt. McLean.
Along with the 255 checks done in the city, there were an additional 80 done in Missoula County as well.
There are three tiers when it comes to sex offenders. Tier 1 is a registered sex offender that is not likely to offend, a Tier 2 offender has a moderate chance of offending, a Tier 3, the chances of that person re-offending is high.
“Our goal with compliance checks is making sure that everybody is exactly where they are. Of course, any sex crime is a high priority for our investigation, and we want to know where all potential offenders are and also the modus operandi of how their prior offenses are, to where if we have similar crimes on other victims of who we should be looking at. So every year we are doing compliance checks on offenders within the county,” said Lt. McLean.
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