**GPS monitoring failure:** The GPS monitoring system was generating hundreds of alerts that were being systematically ignored. The passive monitoring program had no written policy, no enforcement mechanism for agents who ignored alerts, and no supervisory review of agent compliance. The technology had been deployed without any operational framework for using its outputs.
**Neighbor contact failure:** Not a single parole agent ever spoke to a neighbor of the Garrido property. Five neighbors had concerns about the property. One had met a girl named Jaycee in 1991. This information was never collected.
**Local agency coordination failure:** At least 30 contacts between public safety agencies and Garrido or his address were documented, including the 2002 fire department call and the 2006 neighbor’s 911 report. None of these contacts generated a parole notification or follow-up.
**Supervisory oversight failure:** Required supervisory case reviews were missed for years at a time. When supervisors did conduct reviews, they accepted deficient agent work without question.
The sum of these failures is not a portrait of one bad agent or one bad decision. It is a portrait of a system in which the supervision of a high-risk sex offender was treated as a routine administrative function rather than as a specific public safety responsibility requiring active, attentive human judgment.
—
## The Question of Missed Warnings
The case generated considerable discussion in its aftermath about the nature of missed warnings and the limits of what can be demanded of systems operating under resource constraints.
On one side of this discussion is the argument that the Garrido case was, in retrospect, an obvious failure—that the parole agents had access to enough information, and enough opportunities to gather more, that a more attentive system would have detected the captivity much sooner. The OIG report essentially took this position: its finding that only 12 of 123 months of supervision were satisfactory implied that the system had failed at a basic level.