Cyclone Gabrielle: Dozens of offenders with ankle bracelets remain unmonitored in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne a week on

More than 50 people in the community subject to Corrections’ oversight via ankle bracelets remain unmonitored in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle.

As the storm tore through the East Coast and Hawke’s Bay it severed the vital communications links and power infrastructure needed to keep the ankle monitors transmitting live information.

People monitored via ankle bracelets include those serving community-based sentences, offenders released from prison with conditions, and alleged offenders on bail awaiting trial or sentence.

They also include high-risk offenders on rare extended supervision orders, and life parolees.

A few people with monitoring anklets - euphemistically dubbed “high-priority wearers” by Corrections officials - were deemed risky enough when unmonitored that police, security guards, and Corrections staff deployed in the wake of the storm to manually monitor them.

Others on ankle bracelet monitors are understood to have ended up at evacuation centres but were not deemed high-risk offenders requiring manual monitoring.

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The latest figures supplied by Corrections to the Herald show 55 people in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne are not being electronically monitored due to power and communications outages as of 10am on Monday.

That figure is down from 93 on Sunday evening and 203 on Thursday, according to Corrections figures.

Corrections national Commissioner Leigh Marsh said in a statement electronic monitoring staff had prioritised the “manual monitoring” of their most high-risk offenders.

“This includes people who have registered victims, as well as people subject to extended supervision orders and life sentences,” he said.

As of Friday, this covered 13 people in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne, six of whom were subject to an extended supervision order. Police and First Security were assisting in this manual monitoring, he said.

At Justice Select Committee last week, Marsh and Corrections chief executive Jeremy Lightfoot fielded questions about the state of electronic monitoring in flood-hit regions.

The electronic monitoring system relied heavily on the GPS network and the cellular towers, Marsh said.

The washed-out Dartmoor Bridge in Hawke's Bay, a region where a number of offenders remain unmonitored. Photo / Mike Scott

“As we started to see those cell networks be impacted and we started to see connectivity issues we immediately pulled into play our plans in response to what we call our high-priority wearers,” he said.

“Those are the people that we would be most concerned about.”

Corrections moved into a “manual monitoring process” quickly, he said. That involved physically checking people who had curfew conditions were at home when required, while people with “whereabouts conditions” were not going to areas they were barred from.

There were small numbers of those high-risk people subject to monitoring in Northland, Gisborne and Hawke's Bay, Marsh said.

He told the Justice Committee that when ankle bracelets come back online, Corrections staff will be able to see where the offenders wearing GPS trackers had been.

“As the connectivity and the cell system comes back on, all the data from those bracelets is then captured,” he said.

“So we haven’t lost the track of where they were, it’s just retrospectively captured.”

Marsh said there were no reports of people in Hawke’s Bay or Gisborne breaching their conditions or reoffending.

“When connectivity resumes, we will retrospectively review and assess people’s location data, taking into consideration how the severe weather impacted people’s personal safety at the time of the event.

“If we identify any reoffending or non-compliance, we will take immediate action to hold people to account for any breaches. Potential penalties can include breach action, increased reporting to Community Corrections, formal prosecution or a recall to prison.”