Law Enforcement: The Latest Advocate of Social Networking
While social networking has become an unavoidable element of most of our lives, I was surprised to recently learn that law enforcement agencies around the world have now bought into the fad. I was aware that organisations such as colleges and retail companies were using the facebook craze to their advantage, but the idea of logging onto my facebook and seeing that I had a friend request from “Store St. Garda Station” seemed very strange to me.
As I read on however, the concept started to make more sense. Firstly, it mentioned a “police blotter blogs”, in which the accumulated police reports from an area are published on a blog/ twitter feed/ facebook fan page. One police station in Florida is associated with posting their own subjective stories of crimes and mentioned that journalists in the area now use the site as their first source of information for reporting on crime. Digital “Wanted Posters” are a wild – west style addition to facebook which police have come up with; this makes sense as the lightning quick transfer of information only adds to the speed at which they can narrow down the whereabouts of suspects. Missing persons searches can be enhanced in the same way.
The anonymity of the internet has long been part of its appeal, and in this vein it has now emerged that police are encouraging “E – tipsters”: members of the public who give details of crimes without their identities being disclosed publicly. Interestingly, this system has been merged with Google Maps in order to create crime “heat maps” by the police in the Detroit area. Social media “Stakeouts” are another technique in which the posts on sites (twitter especially) are monitored in order to establish patterns which could be linked to criminals. This has been successful in the Cincinnati police department’s work in tracing gang members via MySpace and facebook, seeking out code words and slang which can point to illegal activity. While this has yielded success, a criticism I would have of it would be the “Big Brother” style invasions of privacy which it could lead towards. Finally, Twitter updates are used by several police departments in the U.K and the U.S to inform the public about currently evolving situations which the public could be useful in (missing people), or may wish to avoid (fires, riots etc.).
The anonymity of the internet has long been part of its appeal, and in this vein it has now emerged that police are encouraging “E – tipsters”: members of the public who give details of crimes without their identities being disclosed publicly. Interestingly, this system has been merged with Google Maps in order to create crime “heat maps” by the police in the Detroit area. Social media “Stakeouts” are another technique in which the posts on sites (twitter especially) are monitored in order to establish patterns which could be linked to criminals. This has been successful in the Cincinnati police department’s work in tracing gang members via MySpace and facebook, seeking out code words and slang which can point to illegal activity. While this has yielded success, a criticism I would have of it would be the “Big Brother” style invasions of privacy which it could lead towards. Finally, Twitter updates are used by several police departments in the U.K and the U.S to inform the public about currently evolving situations which the public could be useful in (missing people), or may wish to avoid (fires, riots etc.).
Although the idea of the law being enforced to an extent through social networking (a phenomenon which I have always found tedious), I now see the benefit which sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter can have in making certain jobs easier for the police, as well as strengthening the link between them and the public in their districts. Although it is early days as far as this new blend between police forces and social networking is concerned, I’m convinced it will become a more predominant part of policing in the near future.
I like the po-lice pronunciation detail... ;-)
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