Harran Disagrees with Supreme Court GPS Ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police shouldn’t use global positioning system (GPS) technology to track a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant.

Bensalem Public Safety Director Fred Harran questioned the ruling, but said it shouldn’t stop the township from pursuing criminals.

According a Reuters story, the unanimous ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration, which defended the use of GPS devices without a warrant or a person's knowledge as a legal way to monitor a vehicle on public streets.

The justices ruled that prolonged GPS surveillance constituted a search and should require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Harran said he believes the framers of the Constitution would disagree with this ruling.

“I thought the goal was justice for all,” he said. “We should be able to use this technology as it gets better and better."

“But if those are the new rules, we’ll live with them,” he said. “We’ll wait for clarification from the District Attorney’s office.”

Harran explained that “quite often” use GPS to track suspects. They already obtain a court order before using GPS, Harran explained, noting that under the new warrant requirement the burden of proof would be greater.

“We currently have to prove ‘reasonable suspicion’ of a crime,” he said. “For a warrant, we have to prove ‘probable cause’.”

Harran said he thought Bensalem police and county detectives were the only law enforcement agencies in the county using GPS to track suspects.

“We use every tool in the toolbox to help us lock up bad guys,” he said.

According to the Reuters story, the case began in 2005 when the police secretly installed a GPS device on a vehicle used by Antoine Jones, a suspected cocaine distributor from Washington, D.C.

Jones was convicted, but an appeals court overturned his conviction and life sentence. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling.