The Regional Corrections Board for Tri-County Corrections voted to approve the purchase of licenses for a phone application called Safe Signal this week. The application is intended to increase safety for probation agents when working outside the Polk County Justice Center.
Laws in Minnesota don’t allow probation agents to carry guns, so the app provides an easy way to signal if they were to need help said the Executive Director for Tri-County Corrections Andrew Larson. “What that will allow the agents to do is it will give them greater security in the field doing home visits, job visits or at the satellite office locations where we don’t have many staff or security screening like we do in the Justice Center,” said Larson. “It will give them the ability to be monitored by an offsite agency if there is an issue, something that would require immediate attention and staff don’t have the ability to call for help or 911, they’ll be able to use the application to signal an alert. The company will initiate a response with the ‘Critical Incident Response Plan’ set up with each agency. I think it’s a good option for us.”
The licenses for each app cost $4.50 per month with the agency purchasing 20 licenses which will total just shy of $1,100 a year. The agency had looked into other companies and devices offering similar services but found many of those to be more expensive, some as many as several thousand dollars per month. Larson said Tri-County has been fortunate to not have had a significant incident to date, but it’s good to proactive with officer safety. “We’ve been extremely fortunate over the years that we’ve not had significant incidents,” said Larson. “As I indicated to the board, I’d rather not wait until that happens. It’s good to be proactive. Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t. So, the more proactive we can be in addressing officer safety issues the better off we’ll be not only for the safety of our staff but the general public as a whole.”
Agents can utilize the app, which has built-in GPS tracking, in three ways. One they can access the app on their phone and push a button to call for help. They can wear a tether that is connected to the phone’s headphone jack, which will call for help if it’s removed from the phone. Or they can set a timer for the length of a meeting with an offender after which they would have a code to enter to signal that they have completed the meeting. If they don’t enter the code before the set time runs out, it would automatically issue that call for assistance.
Larson also updated the board on the inmate population at the Northwest Regional Corrections Center (NWRCC). Inmates populations have been uncharacteristically low throughout the summer which is normally when the NWRCC sees it’s highest numbers. But the numbers have rebounded during September due to higher than usual numbers of U.S. Marshall Service inmates that Grand Fork County wasn’t able to hold according to Larson. “For whatever reason, this summer was a bit of an anomaly,” said Larson. “Typically, our numbers during the summer months, because we do have a lot of lakes in our region, that’s where we see the increase in our numbers. That wasn’t the case this year. We saw a pretty significant decrease, but numbers have rebounded significantly this month. We were at 189 for the month of September, year to date we’re at 180, which is pretty much on par with where we were last year. I think last year we averaged 185 inmates per day so we’re down just a couple of percentage points from a year ago. A big driver in that population increase recently is a lot of U.S. Marshall inmates. Grand Forks County has seen some population influx over there, so they are able to take as many U.S. Marshall inmates as they have historically. For the month of September, we were right around 25-26 U.S. Marshall inmates. That’s pretty high for us, we’re typically around 15-16, but we’ve got the bed space available right now so we’re able to help them out. That’s been a good arrangement for us over the last couple of years so, hopefully, that continues.
