The Pittsburgh Police Department is testing a system that alerts authorities is a registered sex offender gets too close to a school or playground.
People who’ve been convicted of child molestation are usually put on list of registered sex offenders. After they’ve served their prison term, if there is one, it is very likely that the perpetrator will be tempted to commit the crime again. In the past, there was no way to prevent that save an officer tracking the movements of every pederast in their district. But the police department of Pittsburgh, PA is working with the district attorney’s office of Allegheny County to test a program by placing bracelets on 43 of the county’s 1,100 registered sex offenders. Inside the bracelet is a GPS monitoring device and if a potential molester enters an area from which he’s forbidden, such as a school, the police will be able to respond immediately. These places are dubbed “exclusion zones.”
“Exclusion zones, for example, [are] schools, daycares, playgrounds, facilities where children congregate for those sex offenders,” said John Hudson, a security consultant for the county. “We’ve identified their red zones. If an offender with a device goes into one of the red zones, an exclusion zone, we’ll be notified immediately.”
“It’s really important for the community to know that once these bracelets are put on these guys the police can watch them 24/7,” said District Attorney Stephen Zappala .
I’m kind of on the fence about this. On one hand, I get the fact that just having on one of these bracelets would be a deterrent for a potential child molester to act on his impulses again. And by committing the crime in the first place, I can be convinced that the offender gave up some of his rights to privacy.
But tracking us by GPS? That’s some Big Brother shit right there. I know people who want use credit cards or buy devices like EZ-Pass that make paying for toll roads way easier because they “don’t want the government knowing where they are.” I can only imagine what they’d think of being tracked with a satellite positioning system.
And a sidenote, I can’t think of registered sex offenders with remembering that short scene in The Big Lebowski when John Turturro as Jesus Quintana has to walk door to door and tell his neighbors that he’s a pederast. What’s a pederast? Shut the fuck up, Donny.
Source: KDKA Pittsburgh
