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California Tracks Parolees With GPS, Then Ignores Alerts
An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago, California decided to require high-risk parolees, such as gang members and sex offenders, to wear GPS monitoring devices. The idea was to relay location information to law enforcement to ensure that the convicts stay where they're supposed to. Unfortunately, the state often misses acting on those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending."
Really, I'd like to know who was in charge of the system, that way I can never hire the guy.
or at least I'd like to know WHY nobody acted on it, maybe he had no budget to do anything?
Don't need to track an explosive collar or anklet. Just remotely detonate.
it looks a little shaky. just another day in pairadice?
Necessary Evils are only used to victimize the innocent, never to protect them.
I have to disagree with the summery because I don't see it as
both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending.
It served the purpose of making the voters think something was being done which is all that is important in US politics.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
“We have stated several times that GPS is an evolving science, where technology and best practices continue to be fluid,” Hinkle said by e-mail. “This is a new policy, and as CDCR leads the nation in
Now their ineptitude makes sense... I didn't realize that GPS was still an evolving standard with constantly changing technology. Maybe these guys need to hire some devs from Twitter/FaceBook/etc ?
It's not useless spending, they just aren't utilizing it properly. The idea is a good one, but just like regulations, it's only useless if it isn't properly enforced.
Living With a Nerd
Damn, there was some other government project that fit this description, which I can't seem to remember just now...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's criminal tracking, not moron tracking. If they were tracking morons they'd just set up shop in Sacramento and/or Washington ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Clearly, RIAA should track these parolees - and fine them $ 150,000 for every time they remove a bracelet or run out of battery power.
That would save the State of California $ 60 million per year it doesn't currently have.
I vote for Walmart. California is where Julia Roberts molests my asshole with a corn fork. I love this state!
Saudi Killer Chip
Not to be dramatic, but never has it appeared that the future could so easily go either way. Maybe people have always felt this, that they were living in such a time, but they didn't have "the curve" of accelerating technology to deal with.
"Officials say the backlog grew because they lacked software to run an ongoing report of all unresolved cases." Prolly all they need is a sql script. But whatever.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
The problem with electronic tracking is the same as alarm systems - a lot of criminals bank on the fact that a lot of alerts just go ignored or unreported and just go about their illegal business.
Unfortunately, the technology, as California implemented it, didn’t work. The case of convicted sex offender Leonard Scroggins shows the system’s problem. Scroggins cut the tracking device off his ankle and allegedly tried to rob or kidnap several women and girls over a two-day period. The device sounded an alarm and parole officers pushed through the paperwork for an arrest warrant, but the process took nearly 24 hours. Even then, police would only learn of the warrant if they picked up Scroggins for some other reason and then checked the appropriate database.
It seems clear to me that an alert from such a device constitutes probably cause for the issuance of a warrant for the arrest of the offender. The tecnology exists to have that happen in a span of minutes, requiring only a judge's (electronic) signature before being communicated to law enforcement who, presumably, would rate this type of case with a fairly high priority. Indeed, the case could be made for automatically generating the warrant automatically, with judicial approval already in place for cases such as this where there was a material violation of the terms of parole/probation.
I read the article and come to a different conclusion. I believe the problem isn't in the technology, because from what I read it mostly worked. It mentioned some false alarms, but nobody hurts because of a false alarm. The problem here lies in the ineptitude of the people using the system.
Let's say we developed a system that detected earthquakes 1 minute before they went off, but 90% of the time it would be a false alarm. Then people proceed to ignore the alarm because it's usually wrong. Now when a real earthquake occurs, those who ignore the alarm blame it on bad technology.
I say no, this is the fault of the reaction, not the technology itself.
High-risk parolees? A parolee is someone who has given their word (parole) that they will behave themselves and check in regularly in exchange for the privilege of spending some time outside of the prison walls. If you have to slap a GPS tracking unit on them then you don't trust their word. If so, then why are you giving them parole in the first place?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
1. Get convicted
2. Obtain GPS monitoring device instead of prison sentence
3. Start your own "GPS monitored criminals" social community website
4. Organize flash-mob event for all criminals simultaneously
5. Profit - or at least hilarity
at one time, when gilded age corporatist assholes employed pinkerton's thugs to kneecap guys just trying to earn enough to feed his children, unions were heroic and noble
in today's day and age, a union is nothing more than a lottery ticket for lazy assholes to earn way way more than middle class salaries, for doing far less, and be accountable and responsible for nothing
additionally, no one can afford to manufacture anything here anymore because of union mandated salary levels, so everything is now done in chinese sweatshops. a committed anti-corporatist would respond it is the corporatists who drive jobs out of the country, not the unions. to which i would respond that that is easy to say, until you actually have to buy the goods with the sticker shock attached to them just so a union member can have lavish benefits and upper middle class salaries well beyond yours
the unions help drive jobs out of the country by demanding far too much for workers. the irony being, in china, people are now unionizing, get this, against the communist government's wishes (that extra twist of historical irony practically makes my head explode)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/global/11strike.html
is it possible in this world to have the balance of power between the unions and the corportatists simply give workers a decent wage and keep jobs domestic and keep goods and services affordable?
and can GOVERNMENT unions simply be mandated out of existence, please?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I see Americans do this a lot. They take a problem that's common throughout the American political system, and try to play down its negativity by suggesting it's a problem that's common elsewhere.
In reality, that's just not the case. In South Korea, Japan, Scandinavia and throughout Europe, the government actually works for the people. Then again, they don't have two shitty parties, but numerous smaller parties who have to work together, and who will quickly be replaced if they deliver only bullshit promises, rather than action, to the electorate.
Most other democracies and republics aren't like America. They aren't two party systems, where both parties are corporate-controlled. Thus many of the problems with American politics are quite isolated just to American politics. To claim they exist elsewhere is just not true, and indicative of a complete ignorance of foreign governments.
The number of false positives is absurd. Spending a lot of money to go out to see if the criminal is really flown the coop or if a stupid cloud has gotten between the GPS and the satellite or even worse the cell tower. Especially if it's anything like the iPhone. I wrote an app to interface the GPS technology on the iPhone. The GPS there used cellphone tower triangulation. This app was hobbled by the piss poor GPS API and unreliability. The thing was constantly telling my program that the iphone was moving between 10 and 24 mph while it was sitting on a desk in Colorado Springs! Another iPhone's stock gps program from Apple could not pinpoint a location any closer than 3 miles in Chico CA. It reminds me of the state of optical character recognition where the accuracy is so bad, its better to type the document in than try to correct the computer's absurd guesses.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
This project probably got through on some scaremongering bill but then when the non-vote winning budget was needed, the politicians knew that the voter does not want to spend any money ever, and voted against it.
Police costs a LOT of money. Crime costs even more but no politician has to raise taxes to fund crime.
Take the "three-strikes" law. Interesting idea, but did anyone in favor of it ALSO vote to increase the number of jails by about a 1000%? Because ALL those rotating door criminals that were out in a couple of months are now in for life. Even if you lock them four to a cell and reduce their life expectancy that way, you still are talking about housing an awful lot of people for a bloody long time. And a life-sentence looses its meaning if they are paroled after 6 months because the need the space.
And if you are against the "three-strikes" system? Then what is your solution and how are you going to pay for it? Prevention? Lots of cops and social workers. Re-education? lots of parole officers. Treating those with mental problems before they come to harm? Very expensive mental hospitals (which were cut and now jails fullfill their role).
This project most likely was started as a way to aid parole officers in their job. Then it became a way to cut costs instead and now you got fewer parole officers with more duties and ever more prisoners to track.
But hey, you got a tax cut... oh wait no. that 300 dollars has seen been added to your bills multiple times.
Oh well. That is what you get for giving everyone the vote. You turn the running of the country into Idols.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This whole planet is a prison.
rewriting history since 2109
If violations are so common with GPS-tagged parolees and convicts, maybe they should reconsider releasing them, eh? Certainly if it's too expensive to *actually* track them down and deal with the violations.
I would have thought that one reason for the program was to save money by releasing low-risk, compliant convicts. If they're NOT low-risk or compliant, then back to prison they can go.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If you're gonna create a system, you need make plan for maintenance of said system (and fund it).. in this case it's enough eyeballs to watch alerts.. but also a policy of how to deal with false alerts (and rectify the system to try and minimize false positives.. which probably will vary by individual parolee).
This is why KISS works.. tbh.. why don't we just outsource monitoring these alerts to some nation that might take this job seriously.. (like.. India?)
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
You see this kind of shit in IT all the time: $boss gives you $new_shiny but does not give you the human resources to manage said $new_shiny, resulting in $new_shiny not being effectively used. Result: $boss jumps on your ass for not utilizing $new_shiny, even though you didn't ask for it (or asked for it with the necessary addition of more humans).
Only difference in this case is that it's cops not IT people.
I suspect that information inundation has something to do with it, too: how many parolees are there who are violating their parole? If it's more than a scant few, chances are they don't have the force numbers to pay attention to the alerts, never mind actually act on them.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The bracelets are there as a deterrent. As long as the parolee's believe every little alarm will be followed up with serious consequences, then the system works fine. Once they figure out that they can set the alarms off with no consequences (e.g. by reading articles like this one) then the system becomes an exercise in futility. Then you have to actually follow up on every notification, despite the fact that 99% of them are false positives.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
it would be great if we all made $150K a year. now enunciate the real world plan in which that is possible
thought so
all you have is wish fulfillment fantasy, not valid social commentary
i actually consider myself quite liberal and have voted Democratic all my life. but when it comes to unions, i see only a bloated historical anachronism that does more harm than good
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They seem to be monitoring those alerts at the micro-second level. Just ask Lindsay Lohan...
What happens to a GPS device if you wrap aluminum foil around it? Does the metal make a Faraday Cage? What about mesh? For that matter, how about pants with metal mesh integrated into them?
Let's not lose track of the primary goal here: to spend money. Why is spending money the goal? Because at the top of the power pyramid, as long as the money passes through your hands, you win. It doesn't matter where it goes or whether it "succeeds" in achieving their "goals". What matters is that the money passes through your hands, giving you a chance to exploit it for personal gain.
There's a reason why every year government costs more, and it's certainly not because government is getting better. It's because the more money passing through the business of government, the more lucrative the business of government for those who control it.
If they have shown that they are high risk,then why are they paroled in the first place? Parole is a reward for good behavior in prison. Do we want violent criminals released before non violent criminals? Both are risks i guess, one might kill me or my family or one might steal everything i have,which one would you choose?
Jack of all trades,master of none
ALL unionized workers get paid that much? Really?
Oh... wait... you were generalizing and putting up a straw man, I get it.
now enunciate the real world plan in which that is possible
You mean a world where everyone makes unionized workers' salaries, benefits and protection and not the actual straw man 150k you mention above?
Easy.
The same one where CEOs DON'T get rewarded by 6 and 7-figure salaries and bonuses regardless if they bring the economy to its knees.
Also... The same one where both CEOs and workers consider a sum like 150k a year "a shitload of money".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"...a massive exercise in largely useless spending."
Useless spending? By the government?
**GASP**
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/business/economy/21pension.html
now you tell me: do i have valid grounds to find this unacceptable?
you introduce a false conflict: that if i stand against the union stooge, that i must by some inference be supporting the ceo making 7 figures while his company crashes and burns
why can't i hate both?
why can't i hate the coddled union stooge AND the coddled ceo, at the same time?
and, most importantly, i reject the notion we should all make the same amount. please tell me we don't need to go into a remedial education about why communism fails
i support capitalism with socialist safety nets. or socialism with capitalist engines. whatever. i simply am complaining about these union stooges obviously getting away with murder. just as much murder as the ceo scumbags with the golden parachutes from the companies they helped destroy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You asked for someone to describe you a world where anyone could have salaries and benefits akin to those enjoyed by union workers.
You didn't ask for someone to fix irregularities in how unions operate.
And besides... Why shouldn't your pension be higher than your last year's salary?
You WERE investing into the fund for decades, right? Not just piling it up - INVESTING. Your money was working for you all that time.
Plus, if I recall correctly, the money you put into you pension fund doesn't get taxed like the rest of your salary.
And again... Why all those straw men? Why couldn't you quote THIS part of the same article?
Some will receive the big pensions for decades.
Thirteen New York City police officers recently retired at age 40 with pensions above $100,000 a year; nine did so in their 30s.
The plan's public information officer said that the very young retirees had qualified for special disability pensions, which are 50 percent larger than ordinary police pensions.
He said several dozen of the highest-paid New York City police retirees had disabilities related to 9/11 and the rest of the disabilities resulted from injuries in the line of duty.
Also:
Mr. Tassone said the only reason he joined the police force was the promise of a full pension after just 20 years, and it would have been wrong for the state or city to go back on the promise after using it to recruit him.
He said he put up with hardships for 20 years as a police officer, "and now I'm at the end of it and I've become a target," he said.
"I broke my hand three times. I broke my left ankle. I blew out my knee.
In my last two years alone, I made between 350 and 400 arrests, and a lot of those people weren't volunteering."
Because he could retire young, he added, it was important to start out with the largest pension possible.
In the coming years, inflation will eat away at his benefit.
Public pensions in New York City and State have had a cost-of-living adjustment feature since 2000, but it applies only to the first $18,000.
"I concede, I have a very good pension, but what's that pension going to be worth when I'm 70 years old?" Mr. Tassone said.
Seriously?
Do you really like straw that much or do you simply hate hard working american police officers?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I see Americans do this a lot. They take a problem that's common throughout the American political system, and try to play down its negativity by suggesting it's a problem that's common elsewhere.
In reality, that's just not the case. In South Korea, Japan, Scandinavia and throughout Europe, the government actually works for the people. Then again, they don't have two shitty parties, but numerous smaller parties who have to work together, and who will quickly be replaced if they deliver only bullshit promises, rather than action, to the electorate.
Most other democracies and republics aren't like America. They aren't two party systems, where both parties are corporate-controlled. Thus many of the problems with American politics are quite isolated just to American politics. To claim they exist elsewhere is just not true, and indicative of a complete ignorance of foreign governments.
Ah yes the old Americans are stupid and the American political system is stupid argument. If you think that multiparty governments solve everything I invite you to view a few pictures:
http://www.damncoolpictures.com/2009/01/fighting-in-parliaments-around-world.html
A politician's job is to stay elected in every democratic system I know of. If this means passing useless laws to make the people keep them in office or spreading rhetoric around like candy then they will do it. They don't actually have to do anything only appear to do something, even if it is a waste of money, manpower and time.
So get off your high horse and realize that neither system is better, they are just different.
retiring at 40? making 6 figures for the rest of his life for doing nothing?
i'm sorry, but you set up again a false conflict: that if i think that that financial arrangement is abusive of taxpayers, then i hate police officers. why can't i respect police officers, support their right to make a good income, and reject this highly abusive pension arrangement? of course i can do that. so stop smearing my words, asshole
i'm through talking to you. you aren't able to talk about the issues, you have to continually distill the most outrageous deduction from something i say and then argue against that, as if that has anything to do with what i am saying. it's like i say i support gay marriage, and you say that means i support men marrying boys. or that i am for marijuana legalization, and you saying therefore i'm for methamphetamine legalization. that's the way you argue. and it basically means you're a fucking asshole not worth anyone's time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I didn't say ANYTHING REMOTELY CLOSE TO THAT.
Here...
You mean a world where everyone makes unionized workers' salaries, benefits and protection and not the actual straw man 150k you mention above?
Where exactly do I say "same amount"?
Also, I have EXPLICITLY argued against your "150k for everyone" straw man.
i support capitalism with socialist safety nets. or socialism with capitalist engines. whatever. i simply am complaining about these union stooges obviously getting away with murder. just as much murder as the ceo scumbags with the golden parachutes from the companies they helped destroy
Oh please... Now you are comparing a unionized employee making couple of thousands more in benefits to a CEO literally STEALING millions?
Pleaaaase...
Face it - you are NOT for "capitalism with socialist safety nets. or socialism with capitalist engines.".
I'm guessing that you would like to be, maybe because you have personal issues with your life so far, which makes you feel somehow "responsible".
But your heart is simply not in it. You are far more to the right, and far closer to laissez-faire deregulated capitalism than you would like to believe.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
i'm sorry, but you set up again a false conflict: that if i think that that financial arrangement is abusive of taxpayers, then i hate police officers.
That was SARCASM... fucking asshole.
Also, there is nothing abusive about Tassone's pension agreement.
RTFM - the guy was planning to retire after 20 years.
So, he busted his ass for that time, pulling in as much overtime as he could.
He also suffered injuries in the line of duty.
Those 20 years are probably more like 30-40 years of 9-to-5 work, but he did them in 20.
Good for him.
Should everyone be allowed to do the same?
Work hard, pull in as much overtime as you can (and have it on record as such), put in as much into your pension-fund and retire early.
Plus, don't get fired so someone could buy a third mansion for his cat.
Fuck yeah!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Come on! Let me see some REAL trolling!
You obviously can't beat my post with arguments - let's see you throw mod points in my face and call me names.
COME ON! BE A PROPER TROLL!
Bah... Kids these days...
In my day, trolls had balls...
Now? They hide behind "anonymous coward" and chuck mod points at you.
Pathetic.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
A simple multiple choice?
... ummm ... no! Such naivety is rife in the device industry. Medical devices in the medical realm fail to succeed in the market all the time - regardless of the depth and strength of their internal implementation. A monitoring device that publishes data into a system that manages the data, generates information (which is only information if it is timely) and enables folks to prioritize their efforts is worth having. No back office system and it is little more than over-priced office clutter.
... the hardware is just the tip of the product iceberg! In a very big proportion of the cases ... if you haven't expended as much (or more) effort on the back office system(s) to support the hardware you have completely missed the boat!!!!!
When it is little more than a fancy paperweight (ankle bracelet)?
OR
When it is a part of a properly focused, scoped, implemented, managed and targeted product suite?
The fact that the product (hardware wise at least) was deployed in the production environment before *even just* the product reporting was properly in place is hugely symptomatic of what was probably a ridiculously rushed through half-baked plan. There is so much more to what a decent data management system is than what appears to have been implemented in this case!
Slap a bit of extra hardware on a person and think that is going to make a jot's difference to their behavior
Discussions around volcano warning systems and the propensity of people to ignore things that they (even subconsciously) declare as 'crying wolf' are engendered precisely because understaffed departments are full of humans who haven't got the time to change strategic direction (or even get one) when using tools right up on the coal face.
When will people realize the value of things they can't see? For heaven's sake people
Pretty shinny hardware is (at best) something that just speeds up our lives (adds workload/stress?) for a time and (a big proportion of the time) little more than a fancy - very expensive - paperweight. When that paperweight engenders a false sense of security things get dangerous fast!
Find the ego-stroking/vote-stroking politicians and bean counters and send them packing for being such idiots as to think the device was the whole story!
Read the post above that one and THEN tell me I am the one flaming.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
He was 20, she was 17. Back around 2003, DA of Santa Ana CA wanted to prosecute him for pederasty or some bullshit. Not to mention they were living together in the same appartment as boyfriend and girlfriend for a year, and the DA still wanted to prosecute. They're still together to this day.
It's not politics, it's not religion: it's what we can do to make money by forcing everyone into the system. No "corpus delicti" like Statutes require, they hit every individual on the head like Wack-A-Mole until they find one conspiracy theorist or someone with trauma that they can push-down like a cash-cow and wham they get their cut of money and a 2 year to 10 year subscriber of State or Federal or County or City services.
Just studying to defend yourself against these transient causes, you can't even improve your lifestyle and upgrade your career. There is that much hostility from government and municipal corporations trying to preserve their selves.
Calling someone a "flaming asshole" is flaming, sad to say. Please be civil.
I haven't read TFA. Or any comments. I'm not really sure if I will. And I'm late to the party, so the mods won't see this - bummer.
But: I have it on good authority (as in: I personally service both the wearable and monitoring devices) that at least one county in Ohio never did care about these things to the extent that they claimed to.
People are issued "tracking bracelets" that go around their ankles in cases of house arrest and such. But there's no centralized monitoring, at all: The only way that a detective would know that a criminal under house arrest had violated their terms, would be to drive by their house and see if they're there.
Yes, that's right: Short-range RF links, much like those that your gas provider likely uses to read your gas meter these days.
So, if nobody bothers to drive by, then nobody will know if the convicted criminal is actually abiding by the terms of their sentence...and even if they do, it's going to be hit-or-miss whether or not they see them actually violating anything.
Of course, the criminals themselves don't necessarily know this. But even so it is more of a deterrence than a highly-regulated sentence.
Color me unimpressed that actual GPS-enabled tracking devices are ignored when boundary alerts go off.
Kid-proof tablet..
How do you call it when person A (e.g. circletimessquare) calls person B (say... me) an "asshole" and a "fucking asshole", to which person B replies with:
That was SARCASM... fucking asshole.
If anything, I've let him off easy.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens