Fox: GPS Can Track Offenders

GPS Tracking Device

Author: By Janice Morse, Enquirer staff writer

HAMILTON - Butler County Commissioner Mike Fox says he has found a low-cost but high-tech way to keep track of convicted sex offenders, people who are on probation and those who are under court orders to stay away from specific locations.

Fox said he recently did a simple Internet search and found a Texas-based company called STOP - Satellite Tracking Of People - which received Federal Communications Commission approval to begin selling its patented ankle bracelet this week.

The new bracelet offers greater sophistication than similar devices, yet costs only about $10 a day to use, Fox said. It could be used instead of jail for some inmates, he said - but the county sheriff says he is somewhat skeptical.

"With this thing, you can build an 'electronic jail' for a person," Fox said. "You just plug in the coordinates of the places they're allowed to go and the places they're not allowed to go. You also can make it time-sensitive - program it with the hours they\'re supposed to be at work and the hours they\'re supposed to be at home."

Fox intends to discuss the idea with his fellow commissioners on Monday, and invite company representatives to come here and demonstrate how their product uses GPS - Global Positioning Satellite - technology to track people\'s movements.

Commission President Chuck Furmon said that, as a retired Hamilton police officer, he can envision how the device might be useful to law enforcement: "The better we can keep tabs on these people, the better off we are." He agrees with Fox that the commissioners should not act until they learn more about the system.

Furmon said there should be input from police agencies, court officials, child-protection workers, probation officers and other interested parties.

County Sheriff Rick Jones said, \"It sounds good on the surface, but I would have to study this more.\"

Jones said he does like the idea of using such a device to monitor locations of sexual predators and sexually oriented offenders, who are required by law to register their addresses. Jones has been instituting spot checks at those addresses following the much publicized case of Jessica Lunsford in Florida. Police say a sex offender who strayed from his registered address has confessed to killing the 9-year-old girl.

But Jones is more skeptical about using bracelets as alternatives to jail. The jail has plenty of room, but the county has had trouble affording the $60-per-day cost of housing each inmate. While the bracelet monitoring system would cost one-sixth that amount per day, Jones doubts many of his inmates would be appropriate for the bracelet system.

"Some people need to go to jail and be afraid of jail," he said.

"Jail is punishment. You commit a crime and you get to wear this little bracelet - so what? What kind of punishment is that?"

STOP's one-piece gray bracelet, called BluTag, is provided to agencies free of charge, said Steve Logan, the company's CEO. The company charges about $10 a day per bracelet to show real-time locations of bracelet-wearers.

The fee could be reduced if the county uses a large number of the bracelets, and offenders could be charged to wear them.

"We have the world's only one-piece GPS tracking device. It's the latest on the market," Logan said.

There are two other main types of ankle bracelet monitoring systems for offenders, he said.

One uses a radio signal to keep offenders on "house arrest," setting off an alarm if the offender and bracelet move a certain distance from a transmission device in the home.

Another type uses GPS technology, but that bracelet transmits a signal to a lunch-box-sized device that offenders tend to misplace, setting off false alarms, Logan said.

With the new bracelet, "You can truly control the offenders' movements," he said.

It's also easy to use, Logan said. Authorities don\'t have to sit and watch bracelet-wearers\' locations - which appear as dots on a computer screen. \"Our system does that for you," Logan said, and it issues an alarm only if a person goes somewhere he shouldn't.

Fox: GPS can track offenders - GPS Tracking Article - Original Document