Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and is @obilon on Twitter. He’s also the Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY.
From felons on Facebook to tips through Twitter, social media is being used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and not just to fight Internet-related crimes. We’re talking about solving crimes that are happening on the street and in your community.
According to Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications and organizer of the SMILE (Social Media In Law Enforcement) Conference being held in Washington D.C. this April, adoption of social media is still in the “very, very, early stages,” but she sees it making an upward turn. “I expect 2010 will be a monumental year,” she said.
But many police departments that have embraced social media are still trying to figure it out.
“Most agencies … are not significantly proactive with keeping up with content and updates,” said Terry Halsch from CitizenObserver.com, developers of the tip411 system for police agencies. “There are some limitations because of uncertainty of how secure information is, how can it be efficiently maintained, [and] the risks and liabilities of entering the world of social media.”
Below are six different ways law enforcement is utilizing social media and real-time search to enhance tactics, disseminate public information, and ultimately prevent criminal activity.
1. Police Blotter Blogs
A police blotter is the record of events at a police station. Traditionally, a desk sergeant kept a register of these events. Nowadays, Twitter feeds, blogs, YouTube, and Facebook Fan Pages are being used by captains and chiefs to put out the digital equivalent of the police blotter in real-time.
Publishing a register of crimes and arrests in an area has been an online activity for a while now, especially through local newspaper websites. But social media is allowing many police officers on the scene to report the publicly available details of a crime for themselves. Reporters are getting their facts directly from a stream of real time-data and blog posts coming from the department.
Individual cops aren’t about to turn into citizen journalists anytime soon, but the police are able, through social media and real-time updates, to provide essential information that the public and news gathering agencies need to know. Journalists today often use the web for their first line of research, and rely on web-based police reports for many of the details they need for a story.
“We don’t just release the police report; we write our own story and post it to our website,” said Mark Economou, the Public Information Manager for the Boca Raton Police Department in Boca Raton, Florida in a post on ConnectedCops.com. “Even more interesting, we are finding the media is just cutting and pasting our stories to their sites, both in television and print.”
The Boca Raton Police Department has developed their own branded web platform that they call Viper. Social media is a very important part of their strategy, and like anyone adopting social media into a plan, they use it to support and enhance the work they already do.
2. The Digital “Wanted Poster”
In the vein of an Old West “Wanted” poster, displayed in the most trafficked area of town, modern-day law enforcement agencies are posting descriptions of criminals on today’s most trafficked spots — namely the social web.
With millions of users, extraordinary reach, and the lightning-fast exchange of text, photos, and video, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are ideal for getting the word out about wanted persons with up-to-the-minute updates.
The Boynton Beach Police Department is a good example. On their Facebook Fan Page, the department put up a post with the headline, “Police need help identifying motorcyclist who robbed man at ATM.” In the post there was a photo from the ATM machine of the crime in progress. The department also cross-posted the information to their Twitter page.
In the UK, the Leicestershire Constabulary is one of a number of police departments focusing on being hyper-local and involved with the community through social media. Their website has a section titled “Can you help?” which is formatted like a blog, and contains posts about ongoing criminal investigations, and a “Wanted Poster” and “Missing Persons” area with photos and requests for residents to respond with any leads they might have.
The stories are also fed to a Facebook Page that is very interactive and updated constantly. They also maintain a Twitter profile, a YouTube account, and the department offers the ability to subscribe to their news feed via RSS. It’s an impressive mixture of social media tools that seems to work fluidly and update automatically.
3. Anonymous E-Tipsters
Tips from the community have been a time-honored way that citizens have worked with the public to fight crime.
Consulting companies are developing very sophisticated ways for the public and the police to interact online. The tip411 program developed by the CitizenObserver Corporation is marketed to law enforcement as a web-based notification toolset. Citizen participation has always been a big part of fighting crime, and the people at tip411 stress that social media “acts as a ‘force multiplier’ by empowering your community to get involved.”
“Anonymous text tip systems are gaining significant traction because they enable young people to provide information without fear of retribution, i.e. ‘Snitches get Snitches,’” said CitizenObserver’s Terry Halsch.
The program allows tipsters to send information anonymously through a variety of means including “anonymous web chat, text tips and secure social media publishing.” Filtered alerts can then be pushed out through a police department’s central location to other web mediums. Bundled with other offerings, tip411 can then be published with Google Maps to create a clickable, interactive crime “heat map” of sorts where others can click on links directly to add more information and tips based on location. This program is meant to encourage increased interaction between the police and the community through real-time web tools.
“It doesn’t matter to us where the information comes from,” said Detroit’s Chief of Police, Warren Evans, a tip411 user. “We just want the information so we can act on it. I want people to know that they can feel safe using this system to communicate with us directly.”
4. Social Media Stakeout
Social media advocates stress listening as a part of any brand’s online marketing strategy. Listening to the bad guys doing bad things has always been a part of police work. It’s important for police to search the real-time web to target particular keywords and phrases being passed around on social media. Use of social media monitoring has a strategic, tactical and operational application for law enforcement.
Boston Police Department Superintendent John Daly spoke about using Twitter search to monitor chatter around the Boston area in real-time. He’s very sensitive to the implications of engaging in this type of search, as many police departments are.
“We have to be very careful because there’s a Big Brother aspect to this,” Daly said.
He stressed that they were not looking at “everyday messages,” as he put it, but specific tweets that signaled something they should be looking into.
“But when people start saying, ‘What’s that smoke coming from the Hancock Tower?’ or ‘Why is everybody running around Copley Place –- is something going on?’ — if two or three things come in we look at patterns, trends, something maybe we should be paying attention [to]. So it’s sort of an early warning system.”
5. Thwarting Thugs in the Social Space
Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are popular with gang members, and police use this to their advantage. Law enforcement has been able to infiltrate street gangs by posing as fellow gang members online, making connections, and intercepting criminal communications as they happen. Information like photos, videos, and friend links help law enforcement understand the dynamics of gangs when investigating their activities.
“Investigators build phony profiles to ‘friend’ gang members either within YouTube, Facebook or Bebo, and then may migrate that friendship to another platform and gain trust and get their ‘friends’ to share useful information,” said SMILE conference organizer Lauri Stevens.
According to an article in 219magazine, police in Cincinnati used Facebook and MySpace to follow more than 20 members of a local gang, the “Northside Taliband.” The evidence they gathered helped law enforcement connect members to a multitude of crimes, including a possible homicide.
Other agencies have employed these tactics as well. The NYPD is using the Internet to monitor gang activity, as well, and in a story reported in the Daily News, cops said that gangs have been communicating on Twitter. They think that one Twitter exchange between gang members may even have resulted in the shooting of a youth. The police seek out code words and slang used by individual members to follow gang members online who are organizing illegal activities.
“It is another tool … just like old phone records,” a police source said in the article.
6. Tracking and Informing with Twitter
As we all know, Twitter has plenty of uses for individuals and companies. Law enforcement also uses the service to communicate with the public.
Stevens told us that she follows at least 700 law enforcement agencies worldwide on Twitter alone. Not all of them are active, but some have found unique ways to incorporate Twitter into their police tactics. “The LAPD used Twitter to monitor crowds during the Michael Jackson funeral,” for example, said Stevens, and the Boston Police have been using Twitter to alert followers of evolving situations in real time.
Sergeant Tim Burrows does media relations for the traffic services unit in the Toronto Police Service. Tim saw his traffic safety messaging hampered by the mainstream media’s editing time lines, so he started using Twitter to talk to the local media about ongoing situations and inform the public. He considers his tweets about traffic safety information a valuable public service.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office took things a step further. When the police wanted to utilize social media they, like many agencies, felt that existing public sites were too unsecured and vulnerable for a system-wide roll out within the department. So inspired by Twitter, the department took things into their own hands.
“CyberVisor was my vision of Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s own controlled Twitter,” said Lynne Martzall, External Affairs Manager, who worked with webmaster Tony Petruzzi to create it.
Since it was rolled out, CyberVisor has been used to broadcast information about unfolding situations, such as crimes in progress, to put out information after a bank robbery and when the Sheriff’s Office was looking for an escaped convict. For now, the public can’t respond to CyberVisor — it’s broadcast only — but it has still be effective.
In one instance, they alerted followers to someone in South Broward County impersonating an officer. In another, they sent out a missing child alert from a local elementary school with a detailed description of the child’s physical appearance and where the child was last seen.
More social media resources from Mashable:
– The Science of Building Trust With Social Media
– How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data
– How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement
– 4 Ways the Entertainment Industry is Getting More Social
– How Musicians Are Using Social Media to Connect with Fans
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jodiecoston
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