Comment by iamshs
9 hours ago
The story is about GPS errors which end up making life hell for people under monitoring since they end up generating a Police response. If 80% alerts were false, then an error like this can result in a surge of these alerts. It is an important story to tell.
Just somewhat mildly important though, given that how do you even end up under house arrest.
Of course, it is true that even criminals deserve a diginified life, and it is also true that this trickles down into the life of normal law-abiding people too, so being aware there makes sense.
I would just tune down the empathy a bit. Not to zero, but below "making life hell".
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And yes, the legal system in the US has problems, but that is a different debate, and hyperbole doesn't help there either.
You do not win the hearts of the people whose hearts you'd need to win to change those issues by talking about how bad it feels to have an ankle monitor.
As far as those people are concerned, it feeling bad is working as intended.
The monitoring device story seems important to tell but the problem seems to be related to monitoring devices, which are supposed to be accurate to 30 meters 90% of the time, being miles off or even reporting the wrong state. That kind of systematic failure does not make a few meters of displacement any more relevant. Saying so really makes it sound like the problem is something significantly less egregious than the devices being incomprehensibly inaccurate - as if we have to solve space weather prediction to a new level of science to not have them report someone in Chicagoland as being in Delaware.