By Angela Hatcher
WSLS10 Reporter
Published: January 31, 2008

Watching every move.

While the General Assembly is hard at work passing new bills, there is one that was passed two years ago that’s helping keep track of sex offenders.

It’s Senate Bill 559.  It’s now a law that requires sex offenders who have twice failed to register online to wear a GPS monitoring system.

Isecuretrac is the company hired by the state to fit offenders with the devices and track them. 

In this 10 On Your Side Crime Watch, reporter Angela Hatcher shows us just how precise these things are and how they’re working to keep you and your family safe.

With a click and beeps.

“That’s not going to slip off.”

Every move I make for the next 24 hours will be watched, just like a sex offender who violates probation.

“We’ll track you down.”

Justin Brown and Thomas McAndrew, of Isecuretrac, fit me with an ankle bracelet and give me the personal tracking device, or PTU, that goes with it.

“It will know you’re anywhere in the world.”, says Brown.

I walk out of the office, but not out of their sight.

Here’s what they see on their computer. 

Those little blue dots are me.  My exact location is recorded and reported to the parole office every ten seconds.

Think of this as a target.  The dark red in the middle, that’s the bullseye, my exclusion area.  The place I’m not supposed to be and one to two thousand feet all the way around it.  The lighter red ring let’s the parole officer know I’m getting too close, this sound let’s me know.

“Right now I’m not even at the park, I’m just driving past it but it knows I’m too close.”

A park, a school, anywhere kids might be.  Justin types in the address and then for me, that place is off limits.

“Right now I’m sitting at the stop light at Brandon and Grandin.  Right over here is Patrick Henry High School, so I don’t even make it onto school property before it tells me to keep away.”

An instant message immediately notifies the parole officer every single time I cross the line and I know, he knows. My PTU, that i must keep with me at all times, lights up with the message call officer now.  Ignore it and you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

“Welcome back.  I’m Angela Hatcher.”

I deliver the news.  At home, you don’t see my ankle bracelet under the desk.

After work, the dots follow me home like a blue snake on the screen. I turn off my usual route.

“You were supposed to leave work and go directly home.”, says McAndrew.

Back at the parole office the next day, Thomas already knows.

“You deviated from your normal path of travel.”, says McAndrew.

And he knows how fast I drive.

“5:10, 24 seconds 54 miles an hour.”, says McAndrew

There’s a long list of all the places I was, where I shouldn’t have been.

“If I were a real offender where would I be right now?”

“You’d most likely be incarcerated right now.”, says McAndrew.

Thomas can account for where I was every 10 seconds of the last 24 hours, but even technology this precise, has its limits.

“That doesn’t tell me what you’re doing or who you’re with.  It just tells me where you are.”, says Randy Phillips.

But probation officer Randy Phillips completely stands by the device.

“I was thanked for placing a gentleman on it because it allowed him to know for lack of a better word he had big brother watching. It was that big brother knew every minute of the time what he was doing. He said that kept him from falling into a routine of going back to re-offending.”

I was tired of big brother and all his beeping.

I cut off my bracelet. But guess what, within seconds, he knows.

The ankle bracelet will only work with the personal tracking unit.  If an offender leaves the PTU behind, the officer will be notified.

A judge can also sentence an offender to wear the device if he or she breaks the terms of his or her probation.

Right now the Virginia Department of Corrections has 76 offenders wearing the bracelets.

Only one of those offenders is in the Roanoke Valley area, but a second will be fitted with a bracelet next week.