Here is a graphical representation of the State of Minnesota’s Level 3 Sex Offender database which you can view in a much less interesting format here.

BUYER BEWARE: the data used to generate this report is fluid in nature and I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the reporting that lies below. That said, this data is updated regularly (probably weekly to begin with but it may go longer as I can’t imagine the L3 offender list grows quickly) and the charts are updated along with it. Please feel free to check back as often as you like:

Following a recent post about a fight/robbery taking place following a minor motor vehicle accident along Highway 13 in Burnsville, I posted a link to my text based archive of Dakota County Criminal Complaints that I have been compiling automatically since sometime last year. bb stacker commented saying he was surprised of the ages of those accused in the crime. I was intrigued to find out exactly how old the general Dakota County offender is and wrote a couple of quick scripts which I thought would be able to pull the information down that I needed.

Well, while I was able to get some of the birthdates with my quick and dirty attempts, I wasn’t able to effectively pull them all. In fact, I only got about a 1/3 of them and I really don’t care to spend much more time on it. With the data I did retrieve the median age is about 28 which isn’t all that young I suppose but again, that data is from a small and error prone sample and is more or less useless.

Looking over the data that I had available to me, I did notice that I would be able to easily obtain the address information provided. So, I first pulled out the hometown city, state, and zipcode of each of the criminal complaints going back as far as I could (12/17/2007). Numerous complaints exist which do not include any valid address information at all and as such, any of those incomplete complaints were dropped. In the end I had over 1450 addresses to work from and have mapped them out for your viewing pleasure. Make sure you check out the regional view as well as the national. Please be aware that these aren’t 100% and shouldn’t be used for homework assignments, letters to your mother, or anything else of even moderate importance as this was only a fun exercise for me to do after I finished up my work this afternoon. Cool? Good.

In addition to the maps I have provided, I took the top 20 zip codes’ raw data and have pasted them here just to give you a more exact idea of where people live who are being arrested most often in the South Metro.

You can continue to read the Dakota County Criminal Complaint text archive which I maintain and update daily at 1PM CST. There are some really interesting reads there (as some of you have undoubtedly noticed) and I encourage you to keep up with the happenings in the South Metro either there or through the official Dakota County interface available here which provides you with the information for the last year in PDF format only.

If you have any thoughts on the topic of crime in the South Metro or what I did above, feel free to comment on, I’d love to hear what you think!