Los Angeles County probation officials Tuesday conceded widespread failures in their electronic monitoring of felons, in which probation deputies were deluged with meaningless alerts while offenders went untracked for days and weeks at a time.
“This is a blueprint of how not to implement a GPS program,” Probation Chief Jerry Powers told the county Board of Supervisors. He said deputies were not at fault, but blamed department administrators and the vendor who sold the county the service.
The hearing was triggered by a Feb. 15 story in The Times disclosing that deputies assigned to supervise felons with global positioning satellite monitoring received about 20,000 meaningless or mundane alerts a month. In some cases, deputies said they ignored the messages, or worried that the deluge obscured serious warnings when an offender was about to flee. Full Article