The GPS program was initiated at the urging of Governor Chris Gregoire after Zina Linnik, a 12-year-old Tacoma girl, was murdered by a sex offender in 2007. The CCOs in King County use passive monitoring. Active includes real-time tracking of an offender’s movements, while passive involves after-the-fact verification, such as once a day. There are two types of monitoring: active and passive. GPS monitoring is a useful tool because it might alert a CCO to changes in a sex offender’s normal pattern, triggering a closer look at what the offender is doing. Before GPS, it was more difficult to know if an offender had been somewhere he is not allowed to be,” said Dept. It can, however, help our officers hold offenders accountable for where they’ve been. “We’ve said all along that no technology, including GPS, can prevent an offender from committing a new crime. Prison officials concede that GPS monitoring is not the sole solution. They note that GPS tracking doesn’t indicate when a sex offender is likely to commit a crime, and gives the CCOs – and members of the public – a false sense of security by knowing the location of sex offenders but not their intentions or what they are doing. “This blows that cloud away, and it’s highly effective in allowing the CCO to intervene before get to a point where they are going to reoffend.”Ĭritics point to the Februslaying of a 13-year-old girl by a homeless GPS-monitored sex offender in Vancouver, Washington. “The only way a person can offend sexually is to have a cloud of secrecy about them,” said Theo Lewis, head of the King County Special Assault Supervision Unit.
What they hope to see is GPS-monitored sex offenders going to and from work, stores, church and their homes while avoiding “exclusion zones.” A computer aids the CCOs in determining where the sex offenders have been and whether they visited a park or school area, which is prohibited. Otherwise, if it isn’t boring, bad things are usually happening. Like firefighters and airline pilots, the ten Washington Department of Corrections community correction officers (CCOs) assigned to monitor high-risk sex offenders in King County via Global Positioning System (GPS) hope for a really boring day at work. Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on G+ Share with email