WASHINGTON, April 17 (RIA Novosti), Lyudmila Chernova – US police use GPS tracking to monitor offenders in the hopes of preventing crime, but such devices cannot always deter crimes or alert law enforcement to threats to public safety, a spokesman for California’s corrections department told RIA Novosti Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, GPS monitoring cannot always deter crimes,” said Luis Patino, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Determined criminals will go to great lengths to commit crimes … and we cannot blame our crime-fighting tools for criminals’ actions,” he added.
This was sadly illustrated Monday as California police reported that two sex convicts, charged with raping and murdering four Los Angeles-area women, were wearing GPS monitoring bracelets when they allegedly committed the serial killings.
At the news conference, authorities announced that the trackers, along with the victims’ cellphone records, helped investigators link them to the killings.
Patino claimed that GPS monitors are not designed to alert law enforcement when one sex offender comes into contact with another.
“A monitor has no way to detect whether a crime is being committed.”
The Californian suspects have known each other since at least 2012, when they cut off their GPS devices in Los Angeles and hopped a bus to Las Vegas. They shared a room at the Circus hotel until their arrest a month later.
“Since offenders must often attend the same counseling classes, substance abuse treatment programs, or live in areas that are far from schools and parks, sex offenders often come into contact with each other,” he explained.
“GPS monitors do alert us when offenders enter zones from which we have excluded them because potential victims may be in that vicinity. For example, exclusion zones are often set up to keep sex-offenders who have abused children from places where kids go,” Patino said. “But other locations would not set off an alert.”
More than 100,000 felons are tracked nationally via anklets, despite criticism of their failure in ensuring that offenders obey the law after being released from prison.
