Electronic monitoring not hard to do

IT IS agreed that there are no serious legal obstacles to the use of electronic monitoring of the movement of people who are on conditional release from jail, including some who are on bail.

Indeed, Delroy Chuck, the justice minister, believes that employing them would be a good idea. It would deal with one of his peeves: that accused criminals, especially those with prior convictions, are too readily offered bail. The national security minister, Horace Chang, often makes the same complaint.

Yet it seems that electronic monitoring is not a priority for the Government and doesn’t figure significantly in its initiatives for fighting crime. If it is, the top civil servant in the national security ministry, Courtney Williams, doesn’t know of it. Mr Williams told this newspaper last week that he was unaware of the matter being considered although Mr Chuck had reported that discussions have been held with overseas suppliers of tracking systems. Maybe those talks were before Mr Williams’ time.

Those discussions, whatever their status, should be rekindled. Ankle bracelets, or other tracking devices, should be in the toolkits of the island’s justice and national security bodies. Getting it done mustn’t have the extraordinarily long gestation period of a full roll-out of body-worn cameras for the security forces about which the authorities have talked for a decade, with only limited headway.

ON AND OFF SECURITY AGENDA

The issue of tracking devices has similarly been on and off Jamaica’s security agenda for a long time. It was recently put back on when Davian Bryan, on bail for rape, became the suspect in the separate cases of abduction of two little girls in Bath, in the eastern parish of St Thomas. Bryan was apparently living in St Thomas because he was proscribed from residing near the rape victim.

Thankfully, after searches by the police and hundreds of St Thomas residents, the girls were found in bushes in the rural parish. But not Bryan. Dr Michelle Thomas, the member of parliament for eastern St Thomas, argued in Parliament that his capture would have been more likely had he been wearing a tracking device.

She said: “We had over 800 persons looking for one man in my constituency. Imagine if that one man had on an ankle bracelet. I am calling for the use of technology to enhance the capabilities of the security system to be able to track somebody… . If he had an ankle bracelet, we would have known exactly where he took it off, if he took it off, or where he is, if he has it on.”

As Chief Justice Bryan Sykes confirmed to this newspaper, but for the restraint of the Constitution (these things have to be done in the context of a judicial process and on the order of an independent court), there is no bar to monitoring devices.

“There is nothing wrong with electronic tagging to track movements, subject to the Constitution,” he said.

TECHNICAL HURDLES

But Mr Chuck suggested that there were technical hurdles to start tagging people. Acquiring the physical devices would be the easier bit. After that, “a protocol has to be put in place for them to be monitored”. Which oughtn’t to be a hard thing to do.

First, we agree, if that is the concern, that no significant numbers of police officers, or other units of the security forces, should be assigned to monitor the movement of people who were fitted with tracking devices. Police officers have other work to do.

Neither would the government need to establish a new specialised department to take on the job. In other words, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are other people who are already in this business, who do it well, we expect, efficiently – albeit they now specialise in monitoring vehicles, such as the anti-theft devices individuals place on their cars, and more elaborate arrangements by firms for the efficient and economic control of their fleets. The underlying technology used on ankle bracelets is the same as the tracking systems used by domestic monitoring companies and could easily be adapted to the needs of the State security system.

Indeed, appropriate agreements with private firms would establish the security and proprietary nature of the information to which the firms had access, which is already covered by the Data Protection Act. Further, it would be more cost-effective for the Government to piggyback on infrastructure and technology that are already in place through outsourcing this service.

To be clear, there would be discreet services. While private firms would do the monitoring, information on the breaches of the space to which monitored persons were limited would be passed on to the police for their action.

From our vantage point, that would be a relatively small investment, whether in the cost of equipment or in time to draft and pass legislation for the use of electronic monitors, for the potential return in improved security and safety and greater efficiency in the justice system.