Sex offenders: How many live near you?

They live in your neighborhood, close to your school and by your park.

And you’ll probably never know it.

“I’m completely shocked, completely shocked,” Bend resident Amy Bibeau said.

Nearly 27,000 registered sex offenders live in Oregon and are enrolled in the state of Oregon’s Sex Offender Registration Unit, which is managed by the Oregon State Police.

Most of the sex offender information is not public — and Sex Offender Registration Manager Jeff Clabaugh admits many people don’t know that.

“There’s a lot of confusion regarding, if somebody is a predator, why are they not posted to the website?” Clabaugh said in a phone interview from Salem.

Jaimi Folkins of Bend is one of those people shocked by what we told her.

Like many parents trying to protect their kids, she’s done her homework — going online to look for sex offenders in her area to check the site at

http://sexoffenders.oregon.gov/

“I think three people in this area was all that I found (online),” Folkins said. “My initial thought was, ‘Wow, I knew that Bend was a safe place, but I didn’t know it was going to be that low of a number.”‘

But it’s not even close to the numbers of who’s really out there. If you head to OSP’s online Sex Offender Inquiry System, the criminals are far and few.

“Our public website allows us to only post about 2 to 3 percent of the total,” Clabaugh said.

OSP data shows only 10 registered sex offenders living in Deschutes County entered in the public database.

But there are more than fives times as many predatory sex offenders living in the county. but restricted from the database.

In all, more than 850 registered sex offenders call Deschutes County home.

In Jefferson County, there are more than 150 registered sex offenders, but only two are available for public information through OSP’s database. Out of the nearly 150 offenders restricted from the website, seven are classified as predatory.

Crook County has more than 130 registered sex offenders, with just one predatory sex offender in the searchable database, and four predators who are not.

Here’s why:

An old Oregon state law still affecting scores of sex offenders says they must meet three criteria to qualify for the OSP public database:

1. While an offender is under supervision, a local authority must categorize a sex offender as predatory.

2. While an offender is under supervision, a local authority must notify people other than family that a sex offender is predatory.

3. Lastly, a local authority must notify state police that the sex offender was under a high level of supervision.

If all three rules are not met, the sex offender stays off the state’s public list.

Right now, there are 10 sex offenders Deschutes County Parole and Probation lists as predatory in its online community notification page.

Very few of them are listed in OSP’s public database.

“The website OSP maintains are those offenders that have been discharged from supervision, but while on supervision were designated predatory and supervised at a high or medium risk,” Parole and Probation Officer Pat Rursch said.

Clabaugh said there are other ways of finding information about sex offenders, but it’s limited.

“We can provide some specific information on a sex offender, as long as that search is based on a specific name,” he said.

Long gone are the days when you could simply request a list of sex offenders in your ZIP codes.

Clabaugh said he didn’t know when OSP stopped providing general information on sex offenders, but did say why: “There’s private companies that are attempting to obtain lists of sex offenders for their own purposes,” he said.

Bottom line: Finding sex offenders in your neighborhood is far from easy — leaving some feeling uneasy about the system.

“I was definitely naive,” Folkins said. “The false sense of security, I think that’s wrong, because it feel dishonest.”

New laws passed last summer are slowly changing the way sex offenders are registered and how their information is available to the public, but the rules are still years away from full implementation.

NewsChannel 21 will have the details on the new law in Part 3 of this special series on Wednesday at 6 p.m.

But first, tune in Tuesday at 6 p.m. as we take a deeper look at sex offenders living in Central Oregon, and how they are managed by local parole and probation officials.