Law Enforcement and Social Media

It’s common knowledge that most criminals aren’t the smartest people around.  Many of them are so proud of their crimes that they feel the need to tell people about them.  This has happened a lot in the past, but now, that just about everyone has at least one social media account, the criminals now have a wider audience they can brag to.  Before social media, it took a while for word to spread about how “George” burglarized 10 houses in one night.  Now, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the word can go out immediately to thousands of people. 

 

While spreading the word mouth-to-mouth took a while, it also took the police to catch up with these criminals.  Social media, along with the egos of criminals, has now made arresting some of these crooks a quick, simple process.  Things go a lot quicker for the police when criminals are posting about their crimes on Facebook and Twitter, posting pictures of their “haul” on Instagram and even posting videos of the crime, as it’s happening, on YouTube. Like I said, criminals aren’t the smartest people around.

 

While criminals have long discovered that bragging about crimes they commit on social media lets people know how “bad” they are, the police are now discovering how to use Pinterest as a means to catch criminals.  In Redwood City, California, police have used Pinterest to post photos of items recovered from arrests in order to return them to their rightful owners.  Detective Dave Stahler had success using Pinterest in February when he posted a picture of a family heirloom that was recovered among other stolen jewelry.  Three users called in tips within a few hours of the post going up.

In Richmond, Virginia, police have used Pinterest to solve murder cases and a town in Pennsylvania set up a Pinterest board to post mug shots.  Arrests for theft, sexual assault and fraud have seen a 57% increase since this board was set up.  Hopefully, more towns will see the usefulness of this and begin their own mug shot boards.

 

While Pinterest is the latest discovery of police departments, the social media platform that they use the most is MySpace.  Apparently, many criminals use MySpace and tend to post about their crimes on that site. 

Social media isn’t just used by police departments in order to solve crimes; sometimes, it’s used to improve their relations within the community.  For example, in New York City, the police department started a Twitter campaign where they asked users to post pictures of citizens interacting with police officers using #myNYPD.  This campaign took off, but, instead of posting pictures of smiling citizens with police officers, many pictures posted were of police using what was considered unnecessary force while making arrests.

While New York City’s campaign was pretty much a failure, Detective Stahler has shown that social media could be a very important and useful tool to help catch criminals.  The use of social media to solve crimes is still very new and a lot needs to be looked at before it becomes more widespread.  For instance, how does one handle Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts in a Court of law?  Will this be considered evidence, or will it be thrown out by a Judge?  We’ll have to see how this plays out, but as long as criminals are dumb enough to brag about their crimes on social media, law enforcement will be there to find out about it one way or another. 

There is, however, a big, unanswered question about privacy.  At this time, the crimes solved using social media have stemmed from people who have seen the posts and notified the police.  Will there be some time in the future when law enforcement will start to hack the accounts of anyone even remotely suspected of committing a crime?  Will they also start to hack the accounts of those associated with these suspects, even if the association is simply being a neighbor or friend of a friend?  That’s something we will just have to wait and see.

Privacy is so important in our lives that we need to do everything we can to protect it.  Privacy Partners can help keep your privacy safe whenever you surf the Internet, by changing your IP address so you can surf anonymously.  In addition to that, every connection is encrypted, so any information that you send out is unreadable to anyone trying to steal it.  Please sign up for the FREE trial offer today.  You have nothing to lose.