L.A. County Probation concedes failures with GPS monitoring

Los Angeles County probation officials Tuesday conceded widespread failures in the county’s electronic monitoring of felons, including deputies being deluged with meaningless alerts while offenders went unmonitored for days and weeks at a time.

“This is a blueprint of how NOT to implement a GPS program,” Probation Chief Jerry Powers told the county Board of Supervisors. He said the blame for the failed program didn’t lie with deputies, but his department’s administration and the vendor who had sold them the service.

The hearing was triggered by a Feb. 15 article in the Los Angeles Times disclosing that deputies assigned to supervise felons with GPS were inundated with tens of thousands of meaningless or mundane alerts a month.

In some cases, deputies said they ignored the messages, or worried the deluge obscured meaningful warnings when an offender was about to flee.

The Probation Department told the newspaper it lost 80 felons who were on electronic monitoring in 2013. However, the department told The Times it could not immediately identify who those felons were.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, a frequent critic of the county’s use of electronic monitoring, had requested the hearing. He pressed for emergency steps to seek a new private contractor to supply GPS equipment to the county.

In its own report to the county, the vendor, Sentinel Offender Services, said many of the problems were the fault of the department, which it said had not properly trained deputies.

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