GPS Fails To Protect Public

GPS units fail to protect public from sex offenders

June 18th, 2010, 3:00 am · 65 Comments · posted by BRIAN JOSEPH, Sacramento Correspondent

This wasn’t supposed to happen anymore.

After voters approved Jessica’s Law, California children were supposed to be safe from sex offenders like James Edward Norkin.You remember Jessica’s Law, don’t you? Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender who had failed to report where he lived, Jessica’s Law was a tough-on-crime initiative on the November 2006 ballot. Dubbed Proposition 83 by the Secretary of State, Jessica’s Law promised, in the words of its sponsors, to “protect our children by keeping child molesters in prison longer; keeping them away from schools and parks; and monitoring their movements” with GPS, or global position satellite, tracking after they’re released. Officials would be able to track every step a convicted sex offender took.
California voters overwhelmingly supported Jessica’s Law, which garnered 5.9 million votes, or 70.5 percent support.
“The passage of Jessica’s Law was a historic victory for the state of California,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s office said in a statement, which repeatedly noted the benefits of tracking sex offenders with GPS. “Jessica’s Law provides crucial enhancement to current laws and policies in the detection, tracking and apprehension of sexual offenders.”
But there we were again Tuesday when the Register’s Salvador Hernandez reported that the 49-year-old Norkin, a convicted sex offender recently released from prison, had been charged with molesting a 14-year-old girl in Orange County – while he was wearing a GPS unit.
Apparently the tracking device was not a deterrent. And to make matters worse, GPS played only an indirect role in connecting Norkin to the alleged crime. He was brought in after his GPS data showed that Norkin had walked across a park, and afterward, a sharp-eyed official recognized his picture from surveillance video of the alleged molestation.
There are more tragic tales. Consider two recent cases out of San Diego: Last month, John Gardner, a San Diego man who was convicted of sexual assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 2000 and served five years in prison for the crime, was sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of two teenage girls. An extensive review of his correction files by the California Office of the Inspector General revealed that while Gardner was on parole, prior to the murders, he repeatedly broke the law while being tracked by GPS, but no one in state government bothered to look at the data. Using the state’s own tracking data, investigators found that Gardner committed at least one felony and violated the terms of his parole on numerous occasions. At one point while he was being tracked, Gardner visited a state prison, which is against the law for a felon for like him. At other times, Gardner violated his parole by being out past curfew, being within 100 yards of places where children congregate and residing near a school.
Any of those offenses could have sent him back to prison before he ever could have killed those girls. But nobody looked at the data.
In another case, Northern California sex offender Leonard Scroggins took off his GPS anklet and headed to San Diego, where he allegedly tried to kidnap several women and teenagers at knife point.  Guadalupe Perez, an eighth-grader, said Scroggins kept telling her, ”Get in the car or I will cut you.’” She screamed and reached for the knife, cutting her finger, then elbowed the man and ran. “If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be here today,” she told a reporter. “I didn’t want to be one of those cases where you find my remains three years from now.”
This can’t be what voters had in mind when they approved Jessica’s Law.
The drumbeat in the months prior to the passage of Jessica’s Law was simple: GPS monitoring will protect children from sex offenders. The governor’s office credits the Antelope Valley Press as quoting LA County Sheriff Leroy Baca as saying, “The goal (of GPS tracking) is to prevent any form of sexual abuse at all from those who have already been identified, arrested for a prior offense, convicted, served their time and are back on the streets.”
But these recent cases show that the perception of GPS doesn’t match reality. Even California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Gordon Hinkle acknowledges a “false notion” surrounding the protective power of GPS tracking.
“It’s impossible to know what someone is doing even if they are on GPS,” Hinkle said when The Watchdog asked him about the Norkin case and about the department’s enforcement of the GPS provisions of Jessica’s Law. “It’s not the end-all to ending crime.”
It would be wrong to assume sex offenders on GPS are “never going to commit another crime in their life,” Hinkle said. Rather, the idea is that GPS tracking can act as a deterrent, or failing that, help authorities solve crimes and alert them when something bad may be happening, as in the notification officials receive when a sex offender cuts off his anklet.
And Hinkle said corrections is adapting. The department recently implemented a new policy that requires parole agents to at least review where sex offenders travel twice a month, over the course of 48 consecutive hours each time. That would reduce the chance of another case like Gardner’s, where nobody looked at his data. But two 48-hour periods over the course of a month still leaves a whole lot of unmonitored time for sex offenders to make mischief.
Hinkle, for his part, termed the Norkin case in Orange County “a sterling example” of how GPS, parole agents and local law enforcement can come together to solve a crime. Norkin, who was released from prison on June 3, was re-arrested on June 9 after GPS tracking software notified his parole agent that he had violated his parole by walking through a park.
Three days earlier,  authorities said a 14-year-old girl on a Orange County Transportation Authority bus was touched by a man sitting next to her. The girl’s friends snapped cell phone pictures of him and the sheriff’s department released surveillance video from the bus, asking the public to identify the man.
When Norkin was brought in for crossing the park, custody staff recognized him as the man from the surveillance video. Later, Hinkle said, authorities checked Norkin’s GPS data and found it matched the travel of the bus at the precise time when the molestation was said to have occurred.
That’s a victory, he said. GPS was used as a “forensic tool.”
Jessica’s Law, however, was never sold as a crime fighting tool. It was sold as protection — expensive protection. A video touting sex offender tracking on the correction department’s website says GPS units cost roughly $1,500 a piece, plus $6 a day to operate. With roughly 7,000 sex offenders on GPS (including a few gang members), that’s $25.8 million a year (including the cost of the unit).
That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider GPS did nothing to protect Norkin’s victim.