Police Turn to Secret Weapon: GPS Device
Someone was attacking women in Fairfax County and Alexandria, grabbing behind them and sometimes punched and molesting them before fleeing. After logging in 11 cases in six months, police finally identified a suspect.
David Lee Foltz Jr., who had served 17 years in prison for rape, lived near the crime scene. To find out if Foltz was the aggressor, the police took out his secret weapon: put a Global Positioning System device Foltz in the van, which allowed them to track their movements.
Police said that soon caught Foltz dragging a woman into a wooded area in Falls Church. After his arrest on February 6, the string of attacks suddenly stopped. The break in the case was based largely on a crime-fighting tool that would rather not discuss.
“We really do not want to give any information about how we use it as an investigative tool to help the bad guys,” said Officer Shelley Broderick, a spokesman for the Fairfax County police. “This is a research tool for us, and is a very new research tool.”
Across the country, police are using GPS devices insidiousness to thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and murderers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates tracking the suspects said electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, in violation of the rights of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step towards George Orwell’s Big Brother society. Officials responsible for enforcing the law, to address the issue at all, said the GPS is essentially the same as having an official track someone, only cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time, as was the case Foltz, judges have sided with the police.
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With the courts’ blessing, and increasingly lower costs of technology, many analysts believe that the police are increasingly based on GPS as an effective tool in investigations and that the public will hear little about it . Last year, FBI agents used a GPS device, while the investigation of an embezzlement scheme to steal the taxpayers District, for a suspect in the Jaguar.
“I’ve seen in the cases of New York City to small towns – who can afford to get the machinery and equipment in a car,” said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “And, of course, is easy to do. You could spend up in a car and planted at any time.”
Most police departments in the region from Washington to resist disclose if they use GPS to track the suspects. DC police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said DC police do not use the technique. Police departments in Arlington, Fairfax and the counties of Montgomery and Alexandria refused to discuss the issue.
Cpl. Clinton Copeland, Prince George’s County police spokesman, said his department makes use of the technique. “But I do not think that is something [detectives] would be too happy to put out there as well,” said Copeland. “They have different techniques they like to use the suspects, but people really want to know.”
Details on how the police often use GPS to become public when the device is challenged in court. These cases have highlighted how the police in Washington state arrested a man for killing his 9-year-old daughter: the GPS device along with his truck took them to where he had buried her.
Cases have shown how detectives in New York affected by a corridor for drugs after monitoring their vehicle as they bought and sold methamphetamine. In Wisconsin, police tracked two suspected thieves to connect a GPS device in their vehicles and arresting them after burglarizing a house.
Foltz The case offers a rare glimpse into how a Washington area police department uses GPS. Foltz’s lawyer, Chris Leibig, contested in the courts police last week and tried to take the GPS evidence expelled. He argued at a hearing in Arlington County General District Court that the police need a warrant from the tracking device Foltz of private cars and on public land. The judge disagreed, and the evidence will be used in the trial of Foltz, which begins October 6. Foltz was indicted by the February 6 attack, but not in others.
