Electronic monitoring and bail conditions in Queensland

What electronic monitoring actually involves

Electronic monitoring means wearing or carrying a device that tracks your location and reports it to a monitoring authority. A GPS ankle bracelet is the most familiar form.

The device sends data continuously and can alert police to a possible breach in near real time. The alerts most commonly triggered are entering an exclusion zone, leaving a permitted area, letting the battery run flat, losing connectivity, and tampering with or removing the device.

Monitoring is never a standalone condition. It sits inside a wider set of bail obligations, usually including a curfew, a residential condition, reporting to a station, and a prohibition on contact with named people.

When a court is likely to impose it

Section 11 of the Bail Act 1980 (Qld) gives the court a broad discretion, but the condition has to be directed at an identified risk. In practice, monitoring is most commonly imposed where:

• the allegations involve domestic or family violence;
• there is a real risk the defendant will breach a curfew or an exclusion zone;
• there is a history of bail breaches;
• the prosecution identifies a specific risk to a complainant or witness; or
• serious indictable offences are charged and the court wants the risk tightly managed rather than refusing bail outright.

That last point is the one worth holding onto. Monitoring is frequently the condition that makes bail possible in a matter where the alternative was a remand.

Children and young people

Children in Queensland can also be subject to electronic monitoring in limited circumstances. Amendments over recent years have expanded its availability for young people charged with serious indictable offences or repeat violent offences.

The court still has to consider proportionality, suitability and the young person’s realistic ability to comply. A monitoring regime that a child cannot actually manage, because of unstable accommodation or no reliable power supply, sets them up to breach.

The technology and where it fails

GPS ankle bracelets are the best known device, but a monitoring regime can use several technologies together:

• radio frequency beacons or home based curfew units;
• hybrid devices combining GPS, wifi and cellular positioning;
• a monitoring centre operating 24 hours a day; and
• mapped exclusion zones tied to addresses or areas.

These systems are sensitive, and sensitivity produces false positives. Positioning accuracy degrades indoors, in basements, in dense urban areas and in poor coverage. A device can report you inside an exclusion zone when you were on the footpath outside it.

That matters because an alert generates a police response, and a police response can generate a breach allegation. Understanding the failure modes before consenting to a monitoring condition is worth doing.

Your position while monitored

Being monitored is not a finding of guilt. You are on bail, which means you have not been convicted of anything, and the presumption of innocence applies exactly as it would without the device.

You are entitled to understand precisely what your obligations are, in writing, and you are entitled to apply to vary or remove a condition that is more burdensome than the identified risk requires or that is no longer necessary.

The counterweight is that the burdens are real and continuous:

• Technical faults. Battery problems and connectivity drops generate alerts that look like non-compliance.
• Boundary alerts. Travelling near an exclusion zone can trigger a report even if you never entered it.
• Visibility. A device that others can see carries obvious stigma, in a workplace, at a gym or around family.
• Work. Charging requirements, curfews and zone restrictions can be incompatible with shift work, fly in fly out rosters or a job involving travel.

Practical steps if you are monitored

Get advice early, before the bail application rather than after the condition is imposed. Once a monitoring condition is in place, the following matter:

1. Know your zones and your curfew precisely. Not roughly. Get the addresses and the times in writing and keep them on you.
2. Document technical problems the moment they happen. Photograph the device, note the time, and report the fault to the monitoring authority immediately. A contemporaneous record is worth far more than a recollection three weeks later.
3. Plan for charging and connectivity. Build it into your day the way you would a medication schedule. A flat battery is treated as non-compliance.
4. Keep communication with supervising authorities clear and consistent. If something is going to affect compliance, tell them before it happens.

And remember you can apply to vary conditions. If monitoring is demonstrably interfering with employment or caring responsibilities, that is a proper basis for an application, particularly once you have complied for a period without incident.

Where this leaves you

Electronic monitoring in Queensland is growing in both scope and complexity, and it is not going to shrink.

Used well, it keeps people in the community, in work, and with their families while their matter is dealt with, instead of on remand. Used carelessly, it creates a set of obligations so tight that a breach becomes close to inevitable.

If you are facing a bail application where monitoring is likely, or you are already subject to conditions that are not working, our page on bail applications sets out the framework, and bail in Queensland covers the fundamentals.