House votes to Criminalize Clandestine Tracking of Vehicles

      Legislation that is key in the fight to protect victims of domestic violence was one of the proposals the House sent to the Senate before legislators went home for their spring break.

      The House voted unanimously to send to the Senate a bill that would criminalize the placing of tracking devices on a vehicle without the knowledge or consent of all recorded owners of that vehicle.  Missouri has no prohibition on such tracking, which is often used by domestic abusers to follow the movements of their victims.

      The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by three legislators.  One of those is Ditmer Republican Cecelie Williams, who filed House Bill 971.  She has shared several times this session her own experience as a survivor of domestic violence, in explaining why she is carrying such bills.

      Williams said Missouri should be addressing vehicle tracking in law.

      “This is really something that’s installed on your vehicle [or] within your vehicle, that you are unaware of that is being used to track you for any reason at all, whether there is malice or malicious intent behind it, none of that should matter.  It’s that if you are going to put a tracking device on your vehicle, that all owners of the vehicle are aware that it’s there,” Williams told colleagues.

      “What this bill does is it provides a criminal offense, a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense, and a Class B felony for a second offense, by violating this law and putting GPS tracking devices on a vehicle [without notifying] all owners that this was being placed.”

      Two bills similar to Williams’ were filed, and then combined with hers.  One of those, House Bill 978, was sponsored by Lee’s Summit Republican Bill Irwin, a retired Navy Seal and Lees Summit Police officer.  When he was presented this legislation he thought, “This is very much common sense.  Who could be against it?”

      Irwin said he saw firsthand the “evils of tracking,” when deployed to Pakistan as a liaison officer for the Special Operations Command Central to the U.S. Embassy. 

A diplomat he worked with there was a woman known for her diplomatic and physical prowess.  One of Irwin’s colleagues became interested in her but she turned the man down.  What happened next was frightening.

      “My military coworker found out that she was returning to the states and [he] took emergency leave to go back prior to her departure.  Fortunately, law enforcement had been appraised of the situation and figured out he was tracking her.  They detained him at the airport and they found in his car a body bag, duct tape, flex cuffs, sharp surgical knives, and a bone saw,” Irwin told the House Transportation Committee.  “Using the tracker evidence and the stuff on him they were able to send him to jail, where I believe he’s still spending time.”

      The sponsor of another version, House Bill 293, is Lee’s Summit Democrat Kemp Strickler.  He said his first introduction to the issue came from a constituent. 

      “Their partner had been tracked without her knowledge by an ex-boyfriend for quite some time, and they only found out about it because they took it into an auto repair or something like that, and they found it and that’s when they learned that she was being tracked.  That was of obvious concern to them and something that he said to me, that’s something we should work with.”

      He also referenced a high-profile double murder-suicide that happened in Lenexa, Kansas, in which a woman from Belton, 22 year old Sara Beck, was murdered.  Investigators believe she was tracked with a GPS device by her ex-boyfriend.

“The ex-boyfriend also set up a geo-fence that would automatically notify him when she showed up at work, when she showed up at a friend’s house, and when she showed up at home,” Strickler told colleagues. 

“Her father said the police have to get a warrant in order to do that to somebody.  Now we’ve got the general public just doing that.”

“This isn’t going to stop it but this will allow us to do something about it when it’s found,” said Strickler. 

“This is a bipartisan bill, this is a public safety bill.  This is going to help protect domestic abuse survivors and hopefully it will, frankly, discourage people from placing them on the vehicles of government officials and legislators, too.”

      The House voted 151-0 to send the legislation to the Senate.