Which SouthCoast Town Has the Most Sex Offenders?

Ever wonder how many sex offenders live or work in your town? Or whether sex offenders prefer living/working in rural or urban areas?

A check of the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry database shows that there are nearly 300 Level 3 sex offenders living/working on the SouthCoast — with most of them in our cities.

According to Mass.gov, Level 3 sex offenders are those considered to have a high risk of reoffending and who may be highly dangerous to the public. Information about them is publicly available due to the potential danger they pose.

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But raw numbers for each municipality may not be very informative — of course Fall River and New Bedford, the cities with the most people, will have the most Level 3 sex offenders registered there (86 and 80, respectively.)

WBSM News crunched the numbers.*

For each of the SouthCoast's 25 communities, we compared the number of Level 3 sex offenders registered as living or working there with population data from the 2020 census.

It turns out that Fall River not only has the highest number of sex offenders overall, but it also has the most per capita, with 0.09% of all Fall River residents being Level 3 sex offenders.

That's more than three times the overall SouthCoast average of just under 0.03%.

New Bedford has also proven to be pretty popular for those convicted of sex crimes, with just under 0.08% of city residents being offenders, or over 2.5 times the regional average.

And Taunton comes in third, with 0.057% of its nearly 60,000 residents being sex offenders.

But the town of Wareham has more sex offenders per capita than the city of Attleboro — 0.056% compared to Attleboro's 0.043% — despite Attleboro having nearly twice the population.

Meanwhile three SouthCoast communities — Acushnet, Berkley, and Rochester — have no Level 3 sex offenders registered as living or working there at all.

Where does your community fit into the rankings? Check out the full list below!

*A note on methodology: the numbers represent Level 3 sex offenders listed as living or working in each municipality. Each name was counted once, i.e. in cases where the same person both lives and works in the same town, or works two jobs, they were only counted once — but if someone lives in one town and works in another, they were counted in each.