Methods to support policy evaluation of sex offender laws

The effective management of convicted sex offenders continues to challenge local law enforcement agencies and public safety officials. While recently enacted legislation at the federal level seeks to increase the monitoring and tracking of sex offenders, legislation at the state and local levels seeks to limit the residential options of convicted sex offenders through various geographic constraints. An issue that arises, however, is the extent to which some communities and/or neighbourhoods are exposed to a disproportionately high number of offenders, potentially placing vulnerable populations at risk. The purpose of this paper is to outline spatial optimization approaches to assess and benchmark spatial risk and the geographic distribution of sex offenders within a community. Results suggest that these approaches are useful decision support tools for crafting and evaluating sex offender residency policies.