A little more than a year ago, California quietly began conducting tests on the GPS monitoring devices that track the movements of thousands of sex offenders. The results were alarming.
Corrections officials found the devices used in half the state were so inaccurate and unreliable that the public was “in imminent danger.” Full Article
Also on Huffington Post
Wow.. such shocking material…. not….. I knew that when I had pay for one… glad my parole officer was on it too…
The only thing these over-priced gadgets are good for is keeping good parolees honest. Unfortunately the truth is; no matter how foolproof they make them, some crafty fool will find a way to outsmart them. It’s kind of like a door lock in my opinion. It keeps the honest people honest. If someone is determined to commit a crime, I’m pretty certain they’ll just cut off their bracelet and disappear into the crowd. Though there are some low-brow’s who haven’t figured this out yet; I give most criminals a little credit on this one. The taxpayers are truly being duped here.
My house doesn’t allow my bracelet to transmit/receive a signal from inside it. My PO is aware of this as is the monitoring center. I do get calls from the monitoring center a few times a week requesting me to step outside for 10 minutes; sometimes at 11pm or 3am which I believe is harassment. I have a pretty regular work routine and leave early for work in the morning. I don’t understand why they don’t just update when I leave the house. I have growled at them on a few occasions, but they’re just doing what they’re paid to do. I don’t hate them; I hate the system.
Let’s see. $51million spent over a few short years… wonder how many parole officers they cut to implement this program?
Good move.
Moving the post that I first posted under General Comments to this thread, which was started subsequently:
Story in tomorrow’s LA Times (Easter Sunday) about how the GPS devices some SORs have to wear are faulty, not tracking them a lot of the time, not sending the reports back as called for, often having the SORs location wrong by as much as 3 miles!
People have been getting convicted for being someplace — and might have actually have been three miles from there!
And the state covered it up, kept it quiet — even saying if they revealed it, people who were convicted might appeal their convictions!
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ff-gps-monitors-20130331,0,2486955.story
Note this paragraph from the story, saying the state had the court seal the information about it in a lawsuit — leaving people wrongly convicted no knowledge of the real reason they were shown to be someplace they were not — and the court, which is supposed to stand for justice and truth, agreed to seal it. So who knows how many sat in prison wrongly convicted:
“In a lawsuit over the state’s GPS contracting, corrections attorneys persuaded a judge to seal
information about the failures, arguing that test results could show criminals how to avoid being
tracked and give parole violators grounds to appeal convictions.”
The devices this story was about were used in California in areas north of Los Angeles, In Los Angeles County and other SoCal counties, a different GPS device was used, which supposedly is more reliable, and now is being used statewide. But just how reliable it is or what faults it might have is being kept secret.
And I also note some other info — the high cost of this. I have argued for a long time that the cost of SO registration, and all the peripheral things that go with it, is a big burden on cities, counties and the state –- and budget busting arguments could be used to try to reduce or eliminate a lot of this, even flat out eliminate SOR for misdemeanants as pointless and far too expensive to justify (but instead, we are talking of misdemeanants having to be in a tier for an unacceptible minimum of 10 years!). Here is what just the GPS contract goes for, according to the story:
“…a winner-take-all contest for the nation’s largest electronic monitoring contract, worth more
than $51 million over six years.”
That’s about $4.5 million a year simply for this for some 7,900 people — and that contract doesn’t include what the state then does with all the information and GPS reports. Imagine the cost of all the SOR and peripheral things for the more than 100,000 SORs in the state — staff to personally take all those registrations, others to look for excuses to bust them, processing, filing, followup, etc., etc.!
Wait a min doesn’t California have a Environment Hazards disclaimer people are suppose to sign ?
I’m wondering if I can sue the GPS company for being an danger to my health bec they didn’t warn me that it could be danger to my health ?
to your reply
Also, it might be wise to start looking into a class action suit because what the parolees don’t realize or maybe some due is that they have a cellphone strapped to their leg, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… sending bursts of radio energy through their leg. All without the federally mandated warning about possible radiation exposure over time.
One time I had the GPS say I was in Oxnard when I was here in Long Beach.. My PO was infront of me doing a check up when he called to ask for my current location, it was during a rainstorm… but normally the thing is off by a few streets.. Most of the time it said I was in the LA River…
For those of us who have had these devices strapped to us for years, this is not new information. I was frequently told by my parole agent that the satellite lost the signal from the device on me, sometimes for as much as 12 hours. And the idea of the signal being off by as much as three miles, I heard from another parolee that his was sometimes off by over 50 miles. And another said his agent called him saying he his was giving two signals, one of him at the parole office, and another walking down the street.
However, did anyone notice the article reports that correction officials said “the public was ‘in imminent danger'” because of this? What the ****!!! Imminent danger, seriously? Are they trying to tell the public it’s not safe to go outside?