How many Registered Persons are there in the US? The answer isn't as simple as you might think

I was asked a question the average person might think is simple:

"Can you tell me, if you know this, how many Registered Sex Offenders there are (approximate) in the United States? Do you know how many more non registered SO's there are?"

My response:

Good question. You may think that's be a simple answer but the truth is no one actually knows!

Up until 2018, the Nat'l Center for Missing and Exploited Children conducted a regular count. Actually, it is motre accurate to say an irregular count. Sometimes, they'd count regularly every six months, but sometimes they did not make a timely account, The last numbers they put out was December 2018, when they claimed there were 917,771 (per 100,000 population - 279) RSOs in the USA. 

But all of a sudden, NCMEC quit publishing these numbers and they took down all of their stats. I saved a number of them over the years. 

Part of the problem with getting an accurate count is the fact each state counts registrants differently. 

A website called SafeAtHome.org (a website hocking security software) offers a different count than NCMEC and claims as of Fall 2019, there are only about 752,000 RSOs. However, they give no methodology for making that claim. I don't know if they just yanked their stats out their asses or if they simply counted those listed publicly. 

Many states include registered persons not living in the community; they could be incarcerated, convicted but living in another state or outside the USA, deported, or even dead. Some states list juveniles as young as age 10, some only list adults. Not every state lists every registrant on the PUBLIC registry. I'm listed TWICE on the National Registry website because i'm registered in Nebraska AND in FloriDUH even though I've NEVER lived there. (I was on Alabama's registry for years because they also keep folks on the registry even after they leave the state, but I'm no longer listed publicly.)

Because I did my own count on Alabama's registry for a study, I'll just compare the registry counts:

My own registry count, May 2017 -- 6101 (not counting nearly a thousand listed who were incarcerated)

NCMEC, Dec. 2018 -- 15,591

SafeAtHome, Fall 2019 -- 10,570

Who is right? All of us? None of us? I don't know the answer. 

Here's a 2012 study: 

Alissa R. Ackerman, Jill S. Levenson & Andrew J. Harris (2012): How many sex offenders really live among us? Adjusted counts and population rates in five US states, Journal of Crime and Justice, DOI:10.1080/0735648X.2012.666407

"Registered sex offender (RSO) population data reported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were compared to data obtained directly from registries in five states

and adjusted for those identified as confined, deported, deceased, or living in another jurisdiction. Results indicate that 43% of RSOs in the five states (ranging from 25% in Texas to 60% in Florida) were not living in the community. Similarly, when estimating point prevalence rates of RSOs per 100,000 people in the US population, rates were substantially inflated when not adjusted for those who are residing in the community. 

A study from 2015 (that I denounced as a garbage study because the conclusions were utter nonsense) stated the following:

"The initial NSOR data set received contained 798,805 records. In this dataset, there were over 1,701 data fields for each record. After an extensive effort to clean the database by removing duplicate entries and consolidating records, 153,777 duplicate records were deleted, leaving 645,028 cleaned records." ("Hiding in Plain Sight? A Nationwide Study of the Use of Identity Manipulation by Registered Sex Offenders." Center for Identity Management and Information Protection (CIMIP), Utica College. Feb. 2015. https://www.utica.edu/academic/institutes/cimip/Hiding_in_Plain_Sight.pdf)

I hate that study and thoroughly debunked their idiotic conclusions but this blurb about how they found many duplicate entiries even in 2015 is still useful info. 

This, unfortunately, means I cannot answer that question because the short answer is nobody knows the actual number. I estimated based on rates a decade ago from NCMEC that we'd have over a million names on the registry. That's entirely possible. Even the lowball estimate of 752k from last year is a huge number (again, there's no answer given how they made their conclusions). 

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So just how many registered persons are there in America? It depends on who you ask. The count is complicated by double posts, listings that should not be on the website due to death or living outside the registering jurisdiction, and states that list some registrants but not others. 

Why did NCMEC decide to quit counting the number of Registered Persons and why did they remove all of their previous counts from their website? My hypothesis is that NCMEC deliberately quit counting because he number was approaching a million, and with that milestone comes questions of the efficacy of the registry. I believe NCMEC anticipated these questions so they simply removed the count. 

It really isn't that important if there are a million Registered Persons or not. If even one Registered Person suffers from oppression because of this disgusting registry, then it needs to be abolished.