NEW YORK — Three decades after they were introduced as a crime-fighting tool, electronic ankle bracelets used to track an offender’s whereabouts have proliferated so much that officials are struggling to handle an avalanche of monitoring alerts that are often nothing more sinister than a dead battery, lost satellite contact, or someone arriving home late from work.
Amid all that white noise, alarms are going unchecked, sometimes on defendants now accused of new crimes.
Some agencies do not have clear protocols on how to handle the multitude of alerts, or do not always follow them. At times, officials took days to act, when criminals tampered with bracelets or broke a curfew.
‘‘I think the perception . . . is that these people are being watched 24 hours a day by someone in a command center. That’s just not happening,’’ said Rob Bains, director of court services for Florida’s Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, which this spring halted its monitoring programs after two people on the devices were accused in separate shootings.
Correctional officials in Orange County, Fla., were so inundated with alerts that they halted all real-time notifications except when people tried to remove their bracelets.
Supporters of electronic trackers say such tragedies are the exception and that the devices are a key tool for authorities who previously relied on shoe leather and the phone to keep tabs on released prisoners.
In many cases involving violence by people on trackers, the accused probably would have been free on bail or parole even if electronic monitoring did not exist, supporters argue.