States Using GPS to Track High-Risk Domestic Violence Offenders

By Mikel Chavers

It is stories like Mary Babb’s that are driving a new movement in the states to track domestic violence offenders using GPS monitoring devices.

Last year, Babb’s estranged husband slammed into her SUV with his pickup truck, according to the Kalamazoo Gazette in Michigan. Babb’s vehicle was overturned and she was suspended upside-down by her seat belt, the newspaper reported. While she hung there helplessly in front of the office where she worked, Thomas Babb fired two rounds from a shotgun, killing his wife while horrified witnesses looked on, according to the newspaper.

This year, Michigan joined a growing number of states tracking domestic abusers and stalkers using GPS devices. The new law allows judges to order domestic-violence suspects to wear GPS devices, even before they go to trial, the newspaper reported.

“The system isn’t set up to protect victims (of domestic violence),” Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard Law School professor, told the Public Safety and Justice Task Force during The Council of State Governments annual meeting Dec. 5. “If you want to protect yourself you go into hiding—and that’s not an appropriate response.”

Rosenfeld is heading up a similar effort in Massachusetts. There, the Greater Newburyport High Risk Case Management Team offers a coordinated response with workers as well as the GPS devices. The group just finished its third year of operation, and had no GPS violations from the offenders, Rosenfeld said.

That program recently received funding to go statewide, Rosenfeld added.

The key to the Massachusetts program is the idea of assessing the level of risk of each domestic violence offender. The program does this by using danger assessments developed by Jacqueline Campbell from Johns Hopkins University. The assessments look at a number of factors including whether the offender has threatened to kill victim, whether the offender owns a weapon as well as whether the victim attempts to leave the offender.

“Domestic violence is about power and control,” Rosenfeld said. And based on research, she said, most domestic violence homicides are preventable and follow a certain identifiable pattern—that’s where these danger assessments come in.

For example, strangulation “has to be considered as a giant red flag,” Rosenfeld said, based on research.

But, experts warn that GPS in itself is not a perfect technology.

“GPS in itself is not the answer. It has to be done with a danger assessment,” Rosenfeld said, “because circumstances can change the level of danger.”

And although GPS is a revolutionary technology, it can cost up to four times more than the technology to make sure there is adequate staff to handle all that using the technology entails and all that’s required in monitoring offenders, according to Joe Russo, assistant director of National Law Enforcement & Correction Technology Center.

 “You cannot throw technology at a problem and expect it to solve anything,” Russo said. “If we don’t have law enforcement and corrections as a team ready to respond to the victims we may be providing a false sense of security to the victim.”