Pensacola Police weigh geofencing use for crime-solving but warns of privacy concerns
Pensacola Police weigh geofencing use for crime-solving but warns of privacy concerns
Publish Date: 2026-05-08 16:53:00
Source Domain: weartv.com
ESCAMBIA COUNTY, Fla. — A geofence is a virtual map around a physical location. It’s a tool used by Escambia County Emergency Management to trigger alerts and notifications.
While it’s purpose for emergencies is clear, the Pensacola Police Department says it could also be helpful in solving crimes.
Pensacola Police Chief Eric Winstrom says it’s a fine line when using this type of information. He says law enforcement having access to location information can be extremely valuable, but it doesn’t come without its concerns for privacy.
Chatrie vs. United States is a federal case out of Virginia, where a geofence warrant was used to find a man convicted of bank robbery.
Police use this type of warrant to ask companies, like Google, for the data on every device near a crime scene.
“It’s very valuable for someone that wants to know where a certain person was or where everybody was at a given time in a certain place,” Winstrom said.
In this case, a geofence warrant was used to solve a bank robbery. But Chatrie argues the warrant was unconstitutional.
“The question is, is it too broad of a net,” said Winstrom. “Did it violate the fourth amendment in that it collected information from a lot of people, a lot of very innocent people who just happened to be there?”
For Chief Winstrom, geofence warrants are nothing new. He says he used the warrants when he was on the force in Chicago.
“If we could get a hold of some of the information in an individual cell phone, we could say we knew for a fact that that person was present at a certain place in time,” Winstrom said. “And that’s helped in investigations that I’ve been involved in the past, certainly homicide investigations helped solve homicides.”
Across the county at the Emergency Operations Center, a geofence has a totally different purpose.
“If we needed to alert, maybe like a neighborhood, or like for like a shelter-in-place for like a gas leak or something like that, we can actually geofence,” Emergency Manager Travis Tompkins…
