The first five Queensland sex offenders have been fitted with GPS monitoring devices, with the tracking system going live today, 1 November 2012.
Speaking with ABC’s 7:30 Queensland program, Police Minister Neil Roberts, underscored that the GPS tracking forms only one part of the monitoring.
“One of the key messages about GPS monitoring is it's not a panacea, it's not fool proof. It only works with the strong support of surveillance staff in the field. So whereas we'll have staff monitoring these offenders 24 hours a day, 7 day a week and there'll be a central monitoring unit to do that there will be surveillance staff working in the field. So where an offender breaches their order in terms of their curfew, or moves into an area which has been defined as an exclusion zone, an alarm will sound and one of the surveillance officers will be able to follow that through.”
Elaborating on the shortcomings of the device, he added:
“[The devices] tell you where an offender is, not what they're doing. And again this is why it's really important to have both the devices themselves and a very rigid and strong protocol about surveillance in the field and that's always been a very strong element of the Queensland Corrective Services oversight and monitoring of these offenders.”
Mr Roberts also added that “Currently there are 67 offenders in Queensland with supervision orders which allow electronic monitoring. So three have been fitted today [28 October 2011], by Tuesday Melbourne Cup day there will be five initially fitted and that's when the system will go live.
“Between now and Christmas we will have another 26 fitted and then the remaining 40 or thereabouts will be fitted up until the end of February. So we've just started to progressively implement the technology to make sure all of the systems and protocols are bedded down. But from Tuesday of [this] week the system goes live and all 67 offenders will be progressively fitted with the devices.”
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