Choosing a GPS monitoring vendor is a long-term commitment — it shapes your officers' daily workload and your court's compliance record for years, not months. Here are the five questions we tell every court and agency to ask before signing a contract.
1. How fast do alerts actually reach an officer?
Ask for a real number, not a marketing claim. At Guardian GPS, exclusion-zone and tamper alerts reach the monitoring center and the assigned officer in under 60 seconds on average — and every alert is timestamped, so you can verify it yourself instead of taking a vendor's word for it.
2. What happens when a device loses signal?
Signal gaps happen — a parking garage, a dead zone, a low battery. What matters is what the system does next. Ours flags a gap immediately, attempts reconnection automatically, and escalates to the officer only if the gap crosses a threshold you set, so real problems don't get lost in noise.
3. Can your reporting hold up in front of a judge?
Compliance reports are only useful if they survive scrutiny. Ask to see a sample report before you sign anything. A good one shows a complete, auditable timeline — not a summary that leaves out the gaps.
4. What does onboarding and training actually look like?
A platform is only as good as your team's ability to use it on day one. Look for a vendor that trains your officers directly, provides a dedicated point of contact during rollout, and doesn't leave you reading a PDF manual to figure out the dashboard.
5. Who do you call at 2 a.m.?
Violations don't wait for business hours. Ask what happens after hours — is there a live monitoring center, or does an alert just sit in an inbox until morning? Guardian GPS staffs a monitoring center around the clock, every day of the year.
"We didn't switch vendors because of price. We switched because the old system couldn't tell us what happened after 5 p.m." — Program Director, county pretrial services
Bringing it back to your program
These questions aren't a sales pitch — they're the same ones our own team asks when evaluating any technology we'd put in front of a court. If a vendor can't answer them clearly, that's worth knowing before a participant is enrolled, not after.
See how Guardian GPS answers these questions
Walk through the Officer Dashboard, alert workflow, and reporting with our team.
Guardian GPS Team
Product updates and field notes from the people building Guardian GPS Monitoring.
