Massachusetts police departments have adopted a new product that’s intended to reduce the dangerousness of police chases.

The product, called the Guardian-VX, is a projectile gun that launches a miniature GPS tag that sticks to a fleeing vehicle.

Essentially, the cops shoot a little GPS tracker onto a fleeing car. If this sounds like something you might find on the Batmobile, you wouldn’t be wrong.

It’s been used in other states such as Florida and Texas before Massachusetts began using them in May 2024. Currently, 30 Massachusetts State Police cars are equipped with the tech.

Is It Constitutional?

The Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful searches and seizures and defines the scope of our right to privacy.

The Fourth Amendment says that cops cannot “search” a person who is minding their own business. They can only search you if there is “probable cause” that a crime has been committed.

Probable cause means more than just a hunch – there needs to be a reasonable inference, given the facts and circumstances of a case, that a crime was committed.

Typically, a cop needs a search warrant to conduct a search of a person or an abode or an automobile. However, there are exceptions to this rule – exigent circumstances (like a fleeing suspect), a search incident to a lawful arrest, a consensual search, and the search of an automobile.

There are different practical justifications for these exceptions, for example – an automobile has the ability to drive away and destroy evidence. For this reason, cops can legally thwart that possibility by being allowed to search the car when you’re arrested in certain circumstances.

What legally qualifies as a “search” is broad. For example, placing a GPS tracker on a car is a “search” within the law, meaning cops typically need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on your car. Unless a warrant exception is met – i.e. fleeing suspect, or search incident to arrest.

It makes sense that absent exigent circumstances a police officer cannot put a GPS tracking device on your vehicle without a warrant in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has held that the installation and use of a GPS tracking device on a vehicle constitutes a seizure under Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and requires a warrant supported by probable cause.

In Commonwealth v. Rousseau, the court concluded that both the initial installation of the GPS device and the subsequent monitoring of the vehicle’s movements interfere with the defendant’s possessory interest in the vehicle, thus constituting a seizure.

The court emphasized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their movements. The longer the chase goes on, and the better the criminal is at evading the police, the more unreasonable it is to believe that the cops would be tracking your every move. At some point, an expectation of privacy becomes reasonable.

Furthermore, the court in Commonwealth v. Connolly emphasized that both the installation of the GPS device and the subsequent monitoring of the data obtained from it require a warrant. This means that any information gathered from a GPS device installed without a warrant would likely be considered inadmissible in court due to the violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Ultimately, I anticipate that these devices won’t raise too many issues in court, as long as the cops can show they had probable cause to make an arrest and that the suspect was fleeing when they uses the GPS launcher. That would meet the warrant exception of exigent circumstances easily.

What’s The Cost?

The cost of a StarChase Guardian-VX vehicle-mounted GPS launcher depends on the city and the purchase package. A look at some of the cities across the country who have utilized these trackers gives a sense of how much this is costing us.

The city of Belle Meade, Tennessee purchased eight Guardian-VX launchers and one Guardian-HX handheld launcher for $73,516. The city of Lynnwood, Washington paid $66,000 launchers, which included the technology, installation, and instructor training. The city of Oakland, California paid StarChase an initial cost of over $150,000, with an additional $30,000 per year for upkeep.

The justification for these devices is that is cuts down on the harm to the community from fleeing suspects. Nearly every day, someone is killed during a high-speed chase between police and a suspect. The San Francisco Chronicle showed that at least 3,336 people died in pursuits in the U.S. between 2017 and 2022. ABC news estimates 577 deaths during police pursuits nationwide in 2022 alone.

By giving police the ability to track fleeing suspects, instead of chase them, Massachusetts hopes to reduce police chase casualties.

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