TRACKING TEENS: Philly is monitoring more kids by GPS than ever.
And it’s turning over geolocation data to law enforcement, no warrant required.
Kids in Philly call it being “on the band.” In recent years, the city’s juvenile justice system has rapidly expanded its use of GPS-equipped ankle monitors to enforce curfews and house arrest.
Today, Philadelphia is tracking teens’ whereabouts at a scale unmatched in any other U.S. city.
Court officials have billed the ankle monitors as a humane and cost-effective alternative to locking up teens in institutions that are expensive, plagued by abuse scandals, and linked to increased recidivism.
But an Inquirer examination of city and state records, along with interviews of teens, parents, lawyers and others involved in the justice system, found that the city’s GPS monitoring has quietly evolved into an aggressive surveillance program through which location data are turned over to law enforcement agencies without a warrant and used in investigations unrelated to the teens’ juvenile cases. The data sharing is happening amid an unprecedented expansion of monitoring, with little-understood consequences for either the teens or for public safety.
Civil rights and juvenile justice experts told The Inquirer that these practices violate state juvenile court confidentiality rules, as well as constitutional protections against warrantless searches.
“It‘s an excessive invasion of privacy,” said Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, particularly for the roughly one-third of teens on GPS who have not been adjudicated delinquent and are presumed innocent. “I don’t think that because kids are on GPS they lose all of their Fourth Amendment and constitutional rights.”
