Public Safety Committee on March 8th, 2012

[Det James Clover]

No. Of those offenders we supervise, approximately half have served their sentence, gone to court, and gotten conditions from a judge after forming reasonable cause in a judge's mind that they pose a risk to the community. They therefore get the condition to wear a bracelet. Two of the 10 were pre-trial cases. These were offenders who had not been convicted. This was a pre-trial matter, so it's like bail. The remaining one was for an offender we extracted from an institution for investigative purposes, and the bracelet was used as sort of a layer of security to ensure that we had a good sound control and supervision over this offender while he was under our care.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

This was either part of a conditional release or this was post-sentence that you got a judge's order for continuing monitoring. Did I hear that correctly?

[Det James Clover]

That's correct. There have been cases of those who have been detained. Let's say, hypothetically, that there is a gentleman who serves a sentence for five years for a sexual assault. He serves the whole five years in an institution, does not get parole, but is now going to be released. I can go to a provincial court and ask for a condition that he be supervised to monitor his risk and, as per that condition, also that he wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Do you need the consent of Correctional Service Canada—because that person is still under its auspices—to get that order?

[Det James Clover]

No. In those cases they're no longer under the care of CSC. They've served their entire sentence. They've gone to warrant expiry, so they're no longer under its care.

It's a very good point, though, sir. Under certain pieces in the code, I have to ask for the Attorney General's approval to use a bracelet. There are applications where I do have to get provincial consent before I proceed.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

I'm assuming the Edmonton Police Service doesn't own any of this equipment. I take it you contract with companies such as Mr. Aloisio's. Is that correct?

[Det James Clover]

That is correct. When we waded into this and tried to leverage the technology, it was imperative that.... We didn't want to own the equipment.

First and foremost, a lot of the offenders subject to this technology will be in and out of jail. When they're in jail, there's no benefit to my having a bracelet sitting on my desk.

So absolutely, I lease both the technology—the bracelet—and the third-party monitoring to help with my capacity in my office.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

From your perspective, is this effective and efficient? I'm suggesting both in terms of security and in terms of cost. Is this an effective way to keep track of individuals whose warrants have expired but, from your perspective, the state needs to keep track of?

[Det James Clover]

When used for very specific cases—those cases we need to complement, those cases that are of extreme risk, those cases where we cannot keep the offender incarcerated—yes. But as you can see, since 2010 I've used this technology very infrequently. So it's only in very specific cases.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

When I'm in Edmonton in two weeks, can I meet with each of you and go through this in more detail?

[Robert Aloisio]

Absolutely.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you.

[Robert Aloisio]

No problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll now move to the opposition side.

Ms. Morin, you have seven minutes.

It's the first round.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Clover and Mr. Aloisio, thank you for being here this afternoon.

Mr. Clover, something you said struck me. You said that electronic monitoring should not be considered a measure to reduce the workload of officers but, quite the opposite, that it actually represented an additional responsibility.

Basically, equipment and human resources costs will obviously go up, because we know more capacity will be necessary in those areas. Could you confirm that?

[Det James Clover]

My point was that it is a draw or a demand on the people who are tasked to monitor this.

Absolutely, there's a financial cost for the equipment. But most important, there is a drain on the resources. People have to monitor this, be involved in this. It doesn't reduce your workload.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

I have a few technical questions for Mr. Aloisio. First off, when an individual is wearing your monitoring device, are their movements being monitored at all times? Does the person have any privacy?

[Robert Aloisio]

I'm going to address that as well as possible. Again, this would definitely depend on the application.

If you're in constant communication, our device, specifically this one—and I'll hold it up again—has the ability to hold GPS positions, and what I mean is to send positions to the server, so people can see basically where the offender is at, up to every minute.

The beauty of our technology is that it's actually a hybrid. We can go back in and adjust all these technical aspects. We can have this thing poll anywhere from one minute to 15 minutes to 30 minutes.

We would really be eager to look at a certain application and build a solution that would be specific for that offender, depending on what would be recommended, of course.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Can users get around the monitoring? Is there a way to scramble the signal? The technology isn't perfect, after all. Have any such problems occurred in the past? Have people managed to scramble the device's signal?

[Robert Aloisio]

I'm glad you asked that question. I'd like to address the committee and let you know that there are limitations to this technology, as there are with any....

Fortunately, what we've been able to do is see patterns. For instance, to be quite honest, no, we have not had a lot of issues with offenders trying to obstruct the signal, whether it's cellular or GPS. The nice thing is that our monitoring centre is trained to look for that. So if for some reason we're not getting a GPS position or something like that for an hour, we can set off an alarm, and then we basically have somebody do a diagnostic on it and come to a conclusion at that time.

I would like you to know that SafeTracks has done its due diligence, as much as possible, to provide a device that is going to be as hard to tamper with as possible. So although the offender may be able to obstruct one form of communication, we have built-in redundancies that are still going to be able to transfer the information.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

You mentioned alarms. What happens when an alarm goes off? How many people are notified? What protocol is followed? False alarms can happen, but—

[Robert Aloisio]

Again, that's a good—

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Forgive me for interrupting.

What I am really getting at here is, in the case of a genuine alarm when actual measures have to be taken, is there enough time to get to the location and intervene before anything happens?

[Robert Aloisio]

That's a good question, and I'd like to address that as well.

Just so everybody is aware, this uses GPS, which is a global positioning system, and it uses a cellular network to transfer the information, just like your cellphone. The device will literally send off an alarm to our monitoring centre within five seconds.

You mentioned procedures, etc. One of the strong points of our software, and the way our architecture is set up, is that the actual, let's say, supervising officer—I'm going to use Detective Clover as an example—can go online and select what he wants done for each specific alarm. Let's say, for instance, he has an offender who is going to an exclusion zone, which is a no-go zone. He can instruct that maybe he wants the siren to go off, that an e-mail come to him, and that members one through four be contacted. The way we can build these responses is completely modular.

All I can say is that the technology is going to alert the supervising officer as soon as technologically possible. Then, of course, it would be in their area to go out to respond.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you.

Do I have any time left, Mr. Chair?