Gainesville — Cooke County has 60 registered sex offenders in its population of nearly 30,000, according to a Texas Department of Safety (DPS) database, and those offenders have homes strewn among nine local cities.

The DPS data, now available online, includes extensive personal details about the offenders — plus current home addresses, a registration item that offenders are often required to submit every few months.

But county officials said that since convicted sex offenders are not typically required to notify neighbors of their status, the online data may be useful for concerned citizens.

“They don’t know unless they actively seek that out,” Cooke County Chief Deputy Jim Carter said Friday.

The online database provides sex offender information about all counties in Texas. A study of nearby regions showed that Denton County has 464 registered sex offenders in its 2010 Census-counted population of 464,662; that Grayson County has 242 offenders in its population of 120,877; and that Montague County has 55 offenders in its population of 19,719.

And for all convicted sex offenders living in Texas, the registration process shares a standard court-ordered requirement: it must be completed within seven days of parole or probation sentencing. Carter said if the offender moves to another county, the same seven-day rule applies and the offender is required to notify city or county officials in both the old and new regions of residence.

“It all falls on them,” he said.

The deputy added that in Cooke County, sex offender registration generally occurs without problems. It is rare, he said, that a convicted offender will violate protocol and avoid the process.

“It’s not common but it does happen,” Carter said. “A majority of offenders do register in a timely manner because they don’t want the extra hassle.”

But the deputy said a convicted sex offender’s failure to register constitutes a parole or probation violation and creates a “brand new file” that puts them subject to incarceration.

In most cases, however, being only a few days late is approached differently than a matter of months.

“We take the totality of it before we decide to file charges,” Carter said. “The only time we file is when it’s blatant. If someone is just a few days late, we don’t file on them. We scold them.”

The DPS database also includes information about the offender’s crime, including the age of the victim. Some sex offender cases in Cooke County involve situations where both people may have consented to the sexual act but only one of them was of the legal consent age, which is 17 in Texas and eight other states. Legally, Texas allows no “close-in-age” exemption, but the alleged offender’s counsel can use this approach in court if the defendant is less than three years older than the victim and if it can be proven the sexual act was consensual.

Locally, those circumstances are more the norm than the exception. The standard image of a registered sex offender to tends to resemble the “deviant-in-a-trench coat” brand, where the person is a convicted pedophile or perpetrator of other heinous sex crimes involving very young minors.

But Carter admitted many of the offenders in Cooke County had victims who were not small children.

“It’s less of the trench coat-type by a long shot,” he said. “Not that I’m justifying what they did. But as far as being a threat to the community, a majority of them aren’t.”