Public Safety Committee on May 15th, 2012

[Steve Chapin]

Nationwide the number of alerts are roughly 1.25 per offender per day. More specifically, Florida is an example I like to use. Florida has a very well-run program where there are repercussions for all violations. It's fewer than one alert per offender per day. In Florida we're tracking, on any given day, 2,700 offenders, so that's 2,700 alerts. Most of those alerts are cleared very quickly.

For example, an offender comes home 10 minutes late—that's an alert. If the officer wanted to know that the offender is home exactly on time, he would get an alert if that offender is home one second late. If the officer isn't interested in getting alerts for things like that, he's allowed to put a grace period on there, which allows the offender a little bit more flexibility.

What we believe is that it's important to communicate all available information back to the officer and the agency.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

If you were to talk about so many bracelets per person-day, is it possible to quantify that for us? In other words, alerts would go out and there would be an officer who would be responsible for 50 bracelets or 100 bracelets. How does that work?

[Steve Chapin]

There are two ways to set up a program. One, an officer can be responsible for monitoring all of his or her caseload. Typically, that would be 25 to 50 offenders, depending on the type of offender. The other way to do it is to have all alerts go to a monitoring centre. It could be an agency-based monitoring centre such as the Michigan Department of Corrections has, and they can clear those alerts. Or it could be a contracted monitoring centre, for example, 3M's monitoring centre, where we would process those alerts. It's also common to have a third-party monitoring centre.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I guess I'm just trying to get an idea of how many person-hours are spent dealing with alerts. In other words, for example, for police forces or border services in Canada, if you're dealing with immigration, would there have to be considerable numbers of new hires to accommodate bracelets? Or is it your experience that existing personnel in a city, or whatever the case may be, can take care of dealing with the alerts?

[Steve Chapin]

You're asking me a question that's starting to get a little bit outside my area of expertise. I can tell you there are no false alerts. There are alerts that are more interesting than other alerts, for example, an alert where an offender has gone into a victim's exclusion zone. There might be an alert that is a “bracelet gone” alert, where an offender stepped away from his bracelet for a minute and then returned, and that alert clears up.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you.

I guess what I'm concerned about is this. You probably don't know that the Canadian government is thinking about border services, for example, and reducing the number of people who are available in border services across the country. If they're looking at a program like this, what sort of extra burden would that put on border services, if they're going to put bracelets on people who are immigrating to the country, for example?

[Steve Chapin]

I wish I could answer that, but that goes more to agency protocol. It would vary greatly, depending on how the protocol was set up.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I have one more quick question. I think I have time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have 30 seconds.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

In Canada we're fortunate to have a small population and a large land mass. The price that you talked about before was probably for a fairly dense area—Florida, California, perhaps—in terms of population and fairly easy monitoring. Would you see that price escalate considerably if we're talking about a large land base and a small population, and alerts going out where people have to cover a large area to deal with the alerts, if they're serious?

[Steve Chapin]

There are no additional costs from the technology perspective. If the agency decided that they needed more personnel, then of course, but it makes no difference from a technology perspective.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chapin.

Ms. Hoeppner, please go ahead.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will be sharing my time with Mr. Norlock.

I just want to clarify something that Mr. Rafferty said. He's incorrect. In fact, we have increased our border security by 26% under our government, which amounted to over 1,000 new border guards. Maybe what he is referring to is the fact that we're cutting some of the fat. For example, there's a $1 million slush fund of taxpayers' dollars that the union has been able to use, and we will be cutting that. But just for the record, I wanted to clear that up. Unfortunately, the opposition voted against all of those initiatives, but we did increase border guards by over 1,000 new border guards, which amounted to about a 26% increase.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Norlock, go ahead.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair

Through you to the witnesses, thank you for appearing today.

My questions are going to be based a little bit on what Mr. Rafferty.... I always ask questions that I think my constituents would ask. In other words, if I thought they were being confused, I would try to....

The distance doesn't matter because we're basically dealing with satellites or cellphones, so distances are irrelevant. It doesn't cost more because you're 50 miles away, or 150 miles away. The technology is still there, the same as a cellphone or a satellite receiver, because that GPS is run on satellite. Is that correct?

[Steve Chapin]

That's correct.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

As far as additional personnel, really, what you'd be dealing with in Canada is people being released on a probation order or recognizance. I think it's the same in the United States; you may use different terminologies. So the probation officers, if they did not have a GPS or a monitoring device, would have no idea other than the word of a witness saying that the accused or the person charged is not in his or her residence. Tell me if I'm correct or not.

[Steve Chapin]

That's correct.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

This device is an assist to the probation officer or the police department or the correctional facility in monitoring prisoners within a facility. I think you said you do that in the United States. I don't believe we do that in Canada, but we might.

Really, it isn't doing—

[Technical difficulty--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right. We'll call this meeting back to order. We're listening to 3M's testimony on electronic monitoring. Mr. Norlock, you have two minutes left for your questions.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My reference to time saving would be investigative time saving. Since 3M doesn't do the investigation, it saves the agency time to investigate, whereas you would provide accuracy. The accuracy is the time-saving device and assists the probation officer or police service or whoever in making sure that all the conditions are met, and the accuracy helps them determine how well the accused or the person attached to the device is behaving in accordance with the regulatory regime. That's what I was referring to.

[Steve Chapin]

I apologize. I misunderstood you. Yes, in that context.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

There's absolutely no need for an apology, but investigations do take time. They all have a dollar value because you're paying people.

One of the concerns this committee had was to do with an urban setting, and the fact that the accused might be going into a subway or into an area where cellphones and GPS...in particular GPS, because cellphones now tend to work better in those confines because there are repeaters. Our concern was the dead zones. In other words, the areas that may pose a problem.

We were told by one of the tracking companies—one of your competitors, I suspect—that some of these issues are becoming less and less of a concern because of the addition of technology.

Do you see anything coming down the pipe? In other words, if an agency contracted 3M, is part of the contract that the technology can be worked into the product as it becomes more sophisticated? Could you précis the evolution?

[Steve Chapin]

The reason we prefer a lease model is that we can continually upgrade and improve our product. As an agency receives new units or replacement units, if the units wear out or if the offender has taken off—and we constantly ship the units—we always ship the latest technology unit.

To go back to your question about an offender entering a subway, GPS absolutely will not work in a subway. In fact, we expect the GPS won't work inside most buildings. Sometimes we get lucky, depending upon the structure of the building, and it does work. But with the technology we're using, we have supplemental terrestrial technology whereby we use cell towers. We don't triangulate, but we know the location of cell towers and we know the location of the nearest cell tower, or perhaps the cellphone repeater, which might be down in a subway. It is not as accurate as GPS, but it is supplemental information.

There are customers or other competitors who tout other tracking technologies, but most technologies are not as accurate as GPS.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Norlock.

I will now move back to the opposition.

Mr. Rousseau, you have five minutes.