Kansas has one of the highest rates of registered sex offenders of any state, study says
Kansas is among the states with the highest rate of registered sex offenders in their populations.
That’s according to a new study released last week by SafeHome.org, a home and personal security company.
The study, which looked at state sex offender registries across the country and their respective populations, found that Kansas ranked in the top 10 when adjusted for population differences.
As of Tuesday, the Kansas registry included the names of 11,071 sex offenders, according to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
About a third of the offenders — 3,581 — are registered at addresses in Sedgwick County, the KBI said.
Kansas came in 22nd in the overall number of sex offenders on its registry — 11,023 as of May — when compared to other states and the District of Columbia.
The SafeHome.org study ranked the state as having the 10th highest rate of registered sex offenders in the country, or 378 per 100,000 residents.
States bordering Kansas all ranked lower on the list: Missouri came in 19th, Nebraska ranked 20th, Colorado was 33rd and Oklahoma ranked 40th.
Oregon and Montana had the highest rates — 749 and 607 sex offenders per 100,000 residents, respectively — while Massachusetts and New Jersey had the lowest rates at 76 and 53 per 100,000 residents.
In all, SafeHome.org found a total of 780,407 names on state sex offender registries nationwide as of May, an increase of about 32,000 entries from 2019, when the organization last analyzed the data.
Texas and California had the most names on their registries, with more than 97,000 and nearly 83,000, respectively.
The District of Columbia had the fewest, with 1,044 names.
The Kansas registry does not include the name or information about every convicted sex offender. Offenders who committed their crimes prior to April 14, 1994 are not included on the public registry under a Kansas Supreme Court decision, and the names of juvenile offenders are also not included.
You can search the registry at www.kbi.ks.gov/registeredoffender.
The state’s juvenile sex offender registry contained 884 names on Tuesday. One hundred eighty-nine of them live in Sedgwick County, the KBI said.
The SafeHome.org study also found that Kansas’s rape rate in 2019 was slightly higher than the national average — 49 reported per 100,000 residents compared to 43 nationwide — and had the same rate of child sex abuse reports as the national average, 83 per 100,000 children.
Authorities and victims advocates have long said, however, that actual rates are probably higher across the U.S. because these types of crimes often go unreported.
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 4:09 AM.
CORRECTION: The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has clarified that some of the people on the juvenile registry are registering publicly while others register privately.
