Plymouth Doesn't 'Ban' Level III Sex Offenders, But Also Doesn't Have Any

Plymouth doesn't have an ordinance restricting where Level III sex offenders can live—but there aren't any such offenders living in the city anyway.

Eight cities in Minnesota have "essentially banned" Level III sex offenders from taking up residence, according to the Star Tribune.

Those cities have restrictive local ordinances that work against a Minnesota law intended to spread out the state's population of Level III sex offenders. Instead, the offenders are concentrated in a few areas, such as north Minneapolis, the newspaper reported: 

Nearly 300 of Minnesota’s most dangerous sex offenders now live outside confinement, and more than half of them are residing in only a few neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a Star Tribune analysis of state records shows.

That saturation is occurring despite a state law that requires authorities who supervise newly released sex offenders to avoid concentrating them in any community. ... In both Minneapolis and St. Paul, frustrated leaders are calling for tougher laws that would result in wider dispersal of the riskiest sex offenders.

Read the full article at startribune.com.

Where Offenders Are
Crystal and Hopkins are home to the nearest Level III sex offenders to Plymouth, according to a Star Tribune map. Then there are the 126 the newspaper reported live in Minneapolis, most on the North Side. (There were 289 in Minnesota at the time of the Star Tribune report.)

The Minnesota Department of Corrections maintains a public online database on Level III Sex Offenders that allows searches by location.

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