No one knows if an effort to update the way New York decides how likely a sex offender is to reoffend will move in the state Legislature this year after more than a decade of inaction.

Part of the bill is intriguing. Sen. Liz Krueger, D-New York City, and Assemblywoman Pamela Hunter, D-Syracuse, say the form most commonly used to assess a convicted sex offender’s danger to the community upon release is the Static 99/R, which aggregates criminal history as well as demographic characteristics to assign a a convicted sex offender a level – the higher the level, the greater the likelihood the offender will commit another offense.

The problem is New York state hasn’t studied how accurate the Static 99/R is at actually predicting the likelihood that a sex offender will reoffend. That’s one reason Krueger and Hunter – and other legislators who have sponsored this bill over the past 13 years – want to take action. If the Static 99/R isn’t a good predictor of future behavior then something new should be devised.

What troubles us is the second part of the bill, which would update the Sex Offender Registration Act to use 21st century actuarial derived risk assessment levels when deciding which sex offenders are most likely to commit another crime once they are released. In our opinion, making such an update to the law without first having deciding if the Static 99/R is unreliable potentially places the public at risk if sex offenders aren’t properly classified. Democrats’ efforts at bail reform have, too often, placed the public at risk. Rewriting the state’s Sex Offender Registration Act’s offender classification system could have the same problem.

That is likely one reason the bill hasn’t moved over the past decade. At the same time, we have seen local disagreement with sex offender classifications by the Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders that rely on the Static 99/R. That’s one reason why local prosecutors have tried to use the Sex Offender Registration Act’s foreign registration clause to impose other states’ more stringent sex offender classification in New York when the Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders has set a lower risk classification. A state appeals court has ruled that clause is often unconstitutionally applied – which makes it important to know if the Static 99/R is reliable or not.

We partially agree with Hunter and Krueger. It’s time to validate the Static 99/R. That would help resolve local questions about the proper classification of convicted sex offenders. But the state shouldn’t make other changes until the Static 99/R is either validated or found unreliable.

No one wants to be the lawmaker who votes to approve legislation that loosens restrictions on convicted sex offenders and unwittingly unleashes a rash of sex crime reoffenses because the new risk classification standards were too lax. This is one of the rare cases where a study bill is actually called for to find out just how accurate the Static 99/R form is.