Milwaukee police will have real-time access to location data of juveniles wearing court-ordered GPS monitoring devices under a new agreement with Milwaukee County. The move comes as officials push to address crime on multiple fronts with a particular focus on auto thefts and carjackings. City and county officials are announcing the partnership today, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The best chance we have to keep an offender out of prison is to properly use the juvenile justice system,” Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said. Information sharing will provide more accountability, he said. “The shortest cut to prison is for some young offender to have learned nothing from their juvenile experience,” Flynn said.
Last summer, Flynn and other police officials said part of their challenge curbing juvenile crime was not receiving real-time GPS tracking information from the county’s Department of Health and Human Services. Under the new agreement, the Police Department’s Fusion Intelligence Center and dispatch center can access the information in two circumstances. The first is if a youth has an “unauthorized violation,” or is found to have broken rules of their supervision by going outside a designated area. The second is if police have probable cause to arrest the youth for a new crime. “If it takes us days or even hours to locate an individual, a lot of negative things can happen in that period,” Mayor Tom Barrett said. Milwaukee police are using an algorithm-based methodology and taking into account factors like criminal history, social connections and “threat intelligence,” according to the agreement.