In the fall of 2006, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement tracked down a sex offender who was supposed to be dead. The man, who had been convicted of a lewd or lascivious offense against a child, was one of possibly 100,000 sexual predators nationwide who fail to comply with address registration laws and are therefore considered “missing.” This one was so missing police thought he had died.

“This man was hopping from state to state and not registering anywhere,” says Mary Coffee, who oversees planning and policy for the department’s sexual offender and predator registration program. “The last state we were able to track him to [Illinois] felt that not only was he not at the last place we thought he was in, they thought he was dead.”

Luckily, Florida was using a prototype version of LexisNexis’s Advanced Sex Offender Search (ASOS) technology, in combination with the company’s Advanced Investigative Solution (AIS). Together, the programs crawl public records, criminal databases and various other data repositories to find the most current addresses and, in some cases, aliases used by unregistered sex offenders.

The program helped Florida investigators track the “dead” offender to Indiana, where he was found alive and, subsequently, arrested for failure to register both in Florida and Indiana.

“Our analysts ran him through the system and found another potential address for him in [Indiana]. Following up with local law enforcement, we were able to find him and confirm his identity,” Coffee says. “The odds of trying to find [him without LexisNexis], just by guessing, would not be high. We had no other leads that would put us on to his trail in that state.”

Florida is one of five states using Advanced Sex Offender Search technology, which the LexisNexis Risk & Information Analytics Group released two years ago but is just now beginning to talk about with media.

Additionally, LexisNexis today is announcing the launch of its Advanced Investigative Solution, which has been used in prototype form by several agencies for the past year. More than 6,500 law enforcement agencies nationwide use some LexisNexis technology to aid in criminal investigations, says Norm Willox, CEO of LexisNexis Special Services.

Advanced Investigative Solution is data integration technology that, for example, allows a law enforcement agency to query its own data against LexisNexis information without either organization having to load data onto each other’s data centers. Willox calls this “high speed fusion” because otherwise agencies can only query one data set at a time.