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| NYPD Announces Program to Track Prisoners With Bracelets |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 07/17/2002 |
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Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced a new tool recently to monitor prisoners and make it tougher for them to escape -- a plastic information bracelet that may one day include a global positioning chip to track fugitives like a stolen car. The commissioner also issued an advisory to the department about prisoner security. Kelly said the pilot program would start within a month in a lower Manhattan police precinct. The bracelet, a thin band of tough white plastic about an inch wide, will carry a picture of the suspect, a case number, a basic description of the charges and a bar code, Kelly said. Kelly's decision comes after several well-publicized prisoner escapes including that of a drug suspect who slipped out of a Manhattan courthouse July 9 by pretending to be a panhandler. The commissioner said the idea of using bracelets had been percolating within the department well before he took the post this year. Some corrections departments already use a similar system to keep track of prison inmates, but Kelly said he knew of no big-city police department that uses bracelets from the moment a suspect is taken into a police station. The New York Police Department is studying whether it would be possible to attach a global positioning chip to the bracelets. The chip would track any prisoner who escapes from custody, Kelly said. But he cautioned any such ''prisoner lo-jack'' system has yet to be tested and might be too expensive to implement. The associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Dunn, said the pilot program sounds sensible as long as the information on the bracelets is destroyed if charges are dismissed or sealed. |
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