GPS Tracking Works Both Ways in Law Enforcement
Next time you hear your police telling you why there are reasons his patrol cars shouldn’t have GPS tracking, just think of this guy:
A global positioning device showed suspended Tazewell County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Bass spent hours at his home, businesses and parked behind a barn while on duty, according to testimony Friday in the third day of his disciplinary hearing…
Lower said Bass "signed on" for duty via police radio at 5:58 a.m. but didn’t leave (home) in his patrol car until 8:50 a.m.
This is a problem we here at SatViz see in a huge percentage of both our business and our public service GPS tracking installation. Employees who "just don’t get going". Usually it’s not quite as egregious as this example, but think of this … fifteen minutes a day. Common, Dave, it’s only 15 minutes" some have said to me. "Fine," is my response. "Fifteen minutes a day is more than a week and half per work year … so you’re saying that even a guy who started work yesterday should get a week and a half vacation"?
Deputies are allowed to take patrol cars home but must be in uniform ready to begin their shift from inside it….After leaving his house nearly three hours later than he was supposed to, Bass drove to the Hopedale Medical Complex, where his wife was employed at the time, and then to Springfield, where he stopped at a cafe.
From there, Lower said, Bass drove to his accountant’s office in Peoria….
Perhaps figuring out how to hide some of his ill-gotten (or at least unworked for gains) for the taxman?
Lower also described numerous other instances when Bass should have been patrolling a particular district inside Tazewell County but wasn’t.
Sheriff Bob Huston’s attorney Thomas McGuire had Lower describe what the device recorded for six days in Sept. 2005.
Lower said Bass spent hours at his home, went to his mother’s house, his dry cleaning business and restaurant, the Peoria Civic Center and other places….
Not long ago I had a client whom I was helping to iron out some irregularities. He had one employee who was pretty much a model employee in every way … including how he drove his company truck … except for one nagging thing. Every Saturday … which was a time and half day for pay purposes, this guy would stop for two hours or more at what my manager friend thought was a retail store customer. I suggested we use Google Maps to look closer at the guy’s exact location. Hmmm. It wasn’t quite that retail store my client had thought. It was on the street behind the store, and looking up the employee’s file, guess what? The address he stopped at, every single Saturday afternoon … at time and a half? It was his mom’s house. Dutiful son.
He also said Bass spent hours parked behind a barn at an abandoned farm house on 14th Street, "on numerous occasions." …
Rest of the article is here: GPS tracking use in the real world . If you want to know a bit more of my own real-world experiences with "cooping" (the police slang term for what this guy was doing out behind the barn) you can read this article. Who Watches Who Watches? And when you are done looking around here, do me one favor? Do something!