Not sure where your confusion is coming from. Have you never used GPS in a place with bad signal? Where it gets confused and you miss your turn? It's the same failure mode. Just the repercussions are getting arrested instead of getting off on the wrong exit.
I think the confusion is probably coming from the fact that the one reference to people being potentially re-incarcerated is buried right down the story.
> Harkins said that since last October, she has seen 30-40 people ordered back into custody based on these progress reports. When asked what can be done to improve CCSO’s EM program, Harkins said that the sheriff’s office needs to “properly and fully” investigate alleged violations before writing reports or taking actions.
You're claiming that erroneously reported movements by ~33 ft lead to incarceration, yet the article you're linking to reports that erroneously reported movements by ~1mi+ lead to police coming to double-check what's going on. Am I incorrect and do you therefore have examples of ~30ft errors actually leading to their incarceration, or are you struggling to see the disconnect between what you're claiming vs. what is actually happening?
If someone's home is 30' by 30' feet, yes, that person's device will report them having left their home and they'll get a visit if GPS suddenly shifts 30 feet to the left.
I'm talking about the class of problem. It happens in normal weather conditions and things like this exacerbate the problem.
As a neutral participant I think “the hostility” is probably because of your condescending tone when you said “hopefully it helps your confusion”. Your initial article really didn’t say anything about people being re-incarcerated for these sorts of errors. I really want to say “maybe you got CONFUSED and posted the wrong one!” but that would be snotty and condescending too.
You seem to care a lot about these issues, and probably have real face-to-face experience with the victims of that.
Problem is though that this feeling type of empathy makes you not the best advocate for them - as you can see here, where (on a platform with worse rules than HN) a flamewar would've broken out over not everyone being as emotionally involved.
We definitely need people like you, but we also need people like you to not be everywhere and scare/annoy people into not caring.
Though, I also agree that scaring/annoying _into_ caring is also often required.
GPS is not that accurate even on a good day. A small device attached to someone’s ankle with a small antenna and an obstructed view of the sky will frequently be registering locations outside of the footprint of someone’s house.
A single 33 foot anomaly is already within the geofence buffer zones used. In dense urban areas the geofence buffer allowance may be 10X that already.
It should be treated that way but we’re talking about elected prosecutors who are itching for an excuse to put people in prison rather than looking “soft on crime” by allowing people to live under house arrest.
No, I’m saying it’s literally treated like that with a buffer zone. That’s how these systems work.
If people were getting arrested every time their GPS tracker was recording a ping 33 feet from the center of their house, nobody would ever survive house arrest.
Do you have any examples of someone getting thrown behind bars due to a GPS error on the order of ~30ft like you're claiming? That's all I'm asking. Really don't understand why you keep avoiding it. You've essentially claimed police/judges are doing something rather stupid and terrible. I'm asking you to show example(s) of what you claimed (~30ft error → thrown behind bars), not something significantly different (~1+ mi error → only-police-visit-but-not-thrown-behind-bars).
"You've essentially claimed police/judges are doing something rather stupid and terrible."
Yes, yes I am. You really need to realize just how unbelievably fucking arbitrary the criminal courts are. At every level. They're not tech people.
To answer your question, I have examples of motions by prosecutors to suspend people from the EM program where they specifically cite specific data points just barely out of their homes, where video footage provably shows they were inside the whole time. They're not mine to share.
Btw, the courts are public and you should try some criminal courts watching. Pick a random day and just go.
> Btw, the courts are public and you should try some criminal courts watching. Pick a random day and just go.
So you could find an example easily but you don't want to? Or you're suggesting court watching in general and not to find an example?
"I have an example I won't share" is better than nothing, I guess. But you were being snarky before you even said that much, when you were just linking your article and not saying if examples existed at all.
I'm curious why they're not yours to share, though. Did someone give them to you under private circumstances, or can people get there from public information but you think you shouldn't spread the word?
I know chaps. He absolutely has cases where people were reincarcerated through faulty GPS pings, he's just trying to avoid listing a bunch of defendants.
He does a ton of really great journalism, a lot of FOIA work, to try and keep governments honest. Here's one of his struggles:
It wasn't easy to find, heh. Lots of FOIA requests to even get to a point of where I could go through court records at the Clerk of Courts. Obstinate lawyers for months and months. But after all that, I can find the court documents at the Clerk of Courts. I printed them there and I don't have them anymore. I would need to redact even if I had them. But they were all the same form, but with the actual violations largely hand-written notes written by a prosecutor in a hurry. It was usually a list of like, ten instances that they seemingly picked from random of the GPS rlogs. The best glance I had into what was by FOIA'ing the GPS records of someone who died much later but had a lawyer who fought tooth and nail to show he didn't leave his home. GPS is truly all over the place in these logs. I validate a lot of that against call center records that themselves took months to get but show when alarms and calls are made to the devices, plus when dispatch is done.
A lot of this stuff is hard to talk about because it's about real people in real pending (at the time) cases.. and I'm also not a criminal defense attorney by any means. There's a reason the first article I posted had their identity completely removed. There's weird liability and believe me I want to say more.
Very honestly, I wish I could have done more reporting on how fucked up those devices were. I put a lot of time and effort into reporting that couldn't make it to print, largely because I was doing freelance work at the time. The first offer I got for that piece was $50. Wasn't sustainable.
Do you have any questions about these EM programs?
If you FOIA’d them, then why would you need to redact?
If you can’t show evidence, then it’s probably best not to cite that evidence. At that point it seems to me that you’re asking people to just trust your claim. You seem like a nice person, but what sort of rational reader trusts an internet stranger.
This is an important issue and you seem interested in the topic.
The documents I'm talking about didn't come from FOIA. They came from printing them at the clerk of courts' office. They aren't redacted.
But yes, these documents should be FOIA'able and I shouldn't have to redact them. It's one of the reasons why I'm involved in advocating for masking the judicial branch FOIA'able in Illinois.
You've kind of spoiled my day with this. Its like an angry chess game when you've got momentum, you POUNCE! But nobody else here appears to have chosen violence. really I get that he "maybe snarked you". But you should be reminded of the beautiful rules of hn discussions.
Thanks for the feedback, but I think you're missing something. This is not about us, it's about everything and everyone else implicated in the discussion. About the fact that we're essentially being demanded to assume - without clear evidence - that the vast majority of those with power over us are categorically incredibly incompetent or malicious. That is not only incredibly insulting toward the good subset of humans who have dedicated and even risked their lives for the public good, but it goes further and sows deep distrust and resentment, continuing to tear apart the very fabric of society. If you/we want to do that, be my guest. It is HN after all. But we damn better be able to justify it with rock-solid evidence, not just go "trust me bro, they're all stupid, they're not techies like us."
Throughout this entire chain of comments, there has not been one shred of evidence that this has actually even happened once, never mind that it is a repeating phenomenon as they claimed. All we have been given is repeated attempts to make us believe those claims were true, supported by claims of existence of (not actual) evidence that - even if existent - would not remotely imply the claim is true. If we want to believe things without evidence and damn other who disagree to hell based purely on beliefs, we certainly can - that's what freedom of religion is for. However, I hope the irony isn't lost on anyone that it's quite literally the diametric opposite of what we're expecting from the justice system.
Whether the claim is ultimately accurate or not, that is what what should be spoiling your day before anything I wrote. It certainly did mine. It should absolutely spoil your day to watch the integrity of huge swathes of people running your society get smeared without clear evidence, with more nails being hammered into the coffin that is the trust holding your society together. Either you're watching something unjustified, in which case that should make you upset on its own, or it's justified, in which case it's even sadder. Either way, I would think that seeing evidence should be at the bedrock of it all, not the last straw whose demand finally spoils your day.
Next time try to make yourself easier to talk to and maybe you'll get better answers. When responding to you it felt like all you were trying to do was "own the left" instead of approach it with actual curiosity and interest. The sort of thing where nothing I say will ever, ever, ever satisfy you. Have a good one.
Neither I nor you should appreciate spreading unsubstantiated rumors that directly attack the public servants neither of us personally know. If it bothers you that I'm defending them, then perhaps don't launch your attacks on them until you can share solid evidence that directly supports your claims. They're not going to be the ones defending themselves here and neither are you, and surely you don't expect us to accept whatever we read as true with zero evidence. Otherwise you're just spreading rumors. You owe it to the people you're talking to to justify any distrust that you're sowing.
And no, I'm not here to "own" anyone, whether left or right or up or down. I'm here to figure out what is true and what is false, and what is a rumor. Hence my question. If you had actually provided solid evidence for your claims in the beginning, I would have spread your words in support of your cause. I don't want innocent people being harmed any more than you do, whether they're wearing ankle monitors or robes.
Those of us who already knew this about the justice system generally can't afford to let that by itself spoil every day? But yes, I can sure see that learning about it would spoil your day.
I mean, I know some good people who work in the US justice system in order to make the world better. But I can list even more US prosecutors who have been caught lying to convict someone who was innocent. Cops who faked evidence, or destroyed it. The judges who convicted kids in order to get kickbacks from the private children's prison, that was pretty bad. It's pretty shocking to be reminded that there are people who believe that the US justice system is made up of well-meaning, well-informed people who do not attempt to ruin anyone's life. Or that it is not a collection of rules that are sometimes designed to ruin many people's lives, or best case simply happen to do that because they were written without any interest in their effect on people's lives or by people with actively incorrect understanding of what their actual impact would be. There is enough information to contradict this naive faith in the justice system, just in the national headlines over the past few decades; people who have gone to the effort of reading entire articles and follow up research, or ever gotten involved personally, can simply forget the level of mistaken trust that half the country grows up with. Like ...you're asking "what is water? How dare you mention water without lab evidence!"
Okay thanks, so here's what I don't understand. When there is video evidence that someone was in their house the whole time, and given that everyone who has used a GPS knows it can easily be inaccurate by 30ft, why in the world would the judge trust the ankle monitor accuracy over video footage they see with their own eyes that directly contradicts it?
Something about this just doesn't seem very plausible, especially if this kind of thing is happening more than once in a blue moon. Either the video evidence is not as convincing as we're being led to assume (thus leaving more doubt in the judge's mind than ours, even if the person is innocent), or there should be some other explanation.
I don't know what to tell you besides yes, it's really that bad. A lot of it is just people passing the buck down the road, a lot of it (at the time) was covid, a lot of it was the difficulty of people on EM to publicly talk about their situation. Defense attorneys just want to get their clients out of jail and a lot of the EM stuff is a distraction to that. It's very much a, "we'll put in a ticket" sort of situation across many moving parts.
Lawyers began telling their clients to film themselves in their homes at all times so that they could prove to judges that they were in their homes when the devices went off. That's advice they give because the risks of not doing that are going back into jail. And to prove all that, you still have to go through all that process, filming yourself, etc. It's truly bad.
Everyone knows video footage can be faked. Why would the judge ever trust video provided by the defendant over serious professional technology like GPS? Might as well just take their word for it!
What’s funny here is that you are displaying misplaced trust in the justice system that exactly parallels my hypothetical judge’s misplaced trust in technology.
No, most people don't know GPS can be spoofed, or at best think of it as a nation-state level action. I'd be surprised if you got less than 100% of non-tech people saying that if GPS contradicts a video then the video is faked.
Since when are Pokemon Go players representative of everyone else? Methinks you should surround yourself with fewer technical people if your goal is to understand what's generally understood about the world.
Why did literally hundreds of judges in the UK accept bogus evidence from the Post Office and Fujitsu leading to nearly 900 innocent postmasters being convicted?
Because judges are nearly always the kind of people who instinctively trust authority. They wouldn't be judges otherwise.
The point is that the enforcement agencies make the assumption that GPS data is always correct. But there are any number of issues that can cause problems with it. People making decisions about how to enforce house arrest or design autonomous farm equipment need to take GPS flakiness into account. Differences in scale are not the point.
> so presumably a number of them are attached to people who did no crimes.
You and I have very divergent views of the type of person likely to be charged or prosecuted for a crime or indeed to participate in a diversion program that involves GPS trackers, my friend.
Your heuristic is flawed. The pool of defendants with pending charges who were granted pre-trial home detention are going to be disproportionately non-violent, first-time offenders compared to those denied bail or with prohibitively large amounts.
Meaning an error like this harms innocent people wrongly accused more than the stereotypically hardened repeat offenders you imagine to be undeserving of your sympathy and presumed guilty.
They absolutely can, depending on the jurisdiction. I saw plenty of cases out of Atlanta with drug possession cases with no prior history getting an ankle monitor, back when they were live streaming bond hearings from Rice street.
What on earth is this claim? Are you sure you’re on top of Fulton County’s 1500-person ankle monitoring program, and the push to reduce jail overcrowding? Have you really been tracking the national trend to introduce ankle monitors for pre-trial defendants who would have been simply released on recognizance?
Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/