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By Greg Bartlett

County fairs are fun events for the entire family, but that could all change if a convicted sex offender was on the fairgrounds. Law enforcement officers realize the seriousness of keeping sex offenders away from such areas and have begun using GPS tracking systems to make sure this occurs.

Sex Offenders & GPS Tracking

GPS tracking systems in the form of anklets are popular to track sex offenders and other criminals who are out of jail on parole. Sex offenders have specific rules about where they are allowed to go and where they are forbidden to go. Using geo-fencing applications, these areas are marked on a GPS tracking map and the police will be notified if the offender enters or gets too close to one of these areas. However, a state or county fair is not one of those specified places since it only occurs once a year.

This means that law enforcement officers need to pay extra attention to these county fairs to make sure that all of the people there are safe. This is why they have decided to “fish” for sex offenders using the GPS tracking systems. Basically, all they have to do is go to the fairgrounds and start monitoring the movements of the sex offenders in the area. It will be easy for them to catch any offender who violates their parole by entering the fairgrounds and they will have the GPS tracking system as proof that the offender’s parole was violated.

This method of fishing for sex offenders has already been effective. Police officers in northern California were able to catch and arrest sex offenders from county fairgrounds just minutes after they enter.

Active GPS tracking anklets have been very helpful for law enforcement officers who are given the difficult job of tracking criminals on parole. The geo-fencing ability of GPS tracking systems makes it easy for police officers to know when a criminal enters a zone that is forbidden or leaves a zone that the criminal is required to stay within. Geo-fencing takes away the difficulty of catching sex offenders violating their parole before they have a chance to harm anyone. All police officers have to do in order to keep sex offenders out of county and state fairs is to spread out around the fairground with laptops and wait for an alert from the tracking system to inform them of a violation.