Public Safety committee  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I also want to thank you for ordering up some of this nice Florida weather for me, to make me feel at home while I'm here. My name is Steve Chapin. I'm a vice-president in 3M track and trace solutions, focusing on electronic monitoring. I w

Public Safety committee  First of all, I'd like to say that it is not one-size-fits-all. That's the reason I talk a lot about an integrated platform, where it's important to match the technology and the supervision level with the offender. The system we provide is an all-encompassing system, so it is in

Public Safety committee  We don't intervene with the monitoring. The system is an automated system. We process the alerts automatically, but we process those without human intervention. The devices communicate with our facility, either our facility in Florida, or perhaps in the case of Canada, a local fa

Public Safety committee  We typically work on a lease model, so we lease the units to the agency on a dollar per unit, per day basis. The agency only pays for units that are what we call “on leg”. They only pay for units that are being used, which allows the agency to very accurately budget what their ut

Public Safety committee  Typically, the agencies using our devices are putting them on the high-risk offenders already in our community, in order to add an additional layer of public safety. However, from a purely technological perspective, we're capable of tracking the full gamut of offenders from juven

Public Safety committee  There is no technical reason why it could not be used for immigration.

Public Safety committee  Forgive me for giving a range of price, but I'm trying to be as open as I can. We have some of our larger contracts in California, where the price per day is $4 for GPS tracking. Some of our smaller contracts that require many additional services may go up to $10 to $12 a day. Fo

Public Safety committee  We structure contracts in different ways. We offer quantity discounts when we hit quantity milestones, because we try to share the economies of scale back with our customers. So the more devices we have in a particular area, the more efficient we can be, so the price goes down.

Public Safety committee  Are you asking if they're very accurate?

Public Safety committee  In our devices we use an off-the-shelf GPS chip set. It's very commonly used. It's the same chip set that might be used in airliners, or by the military. The specifications on that GPS chip set are that 95% of the points recorded are accurate through 10 metres. We actually see sl

Public Safety committee  Being under house arrest is no walk in the park. There are a lot of rules with which an offender must comply, if a program is properly set up. If an offender complies with those rules—and typically in well-run programs we see less than one violation per offender per day—then the

Public Safety committee  If an offender is separated from the device after a very short period of time—and that time period is adjustable—the device sends out an alert. We call it a “bracelet gone” alert, both to the agency and also to the offender. The bracelet vibrates, alerting him to the fact he is o

Public Safety committee  This is actually a transceiver. The ankle bracelet sends out an encrypted RF signal once every 25 seconds and waits for a reply from the device, so it tethers him to the device. The BlackBerry device does all of the tracking, all of the communication, all of the processing of rul

Public Safety committee  If I said $1 a day, I misspoke. I thought I said roughly $5 to $10 a day. If I said $1 a day, I apologize to the committee. I certainly didn't mean to mislead you. The charge, again, depends on the level of service you want, but it's roughly $5 a day and from there additional s

Public Safety committee  Yes, 3M does manufacture the device. The Pro Tech logo that you see on the device is my old company, and we're still in the process of transitioning the branding over from Pro Tech to 3M, but this is a 3M device and 3M is now the original equipment manufacturer of this device. Th