Social Media and Law Enforcement, Research Paper Example

Abstract

This paper discusses the pros and cons of police use of social media. I ask two central questions about such use, and introduce the three basic forms of social media available to the police. I discuss a specific social phenomenon that is making police use of social media increasingly necessary, and what problems may hinder the inclusion of the monitoring of social media into routine police work. I then suggest a solution. A potential societal threat that is posed by mandating social-media information from job applicants is discussed, as well as how that threat could impact criminal prosecutions. I conclude that police use of social media is essentially a necessary evil, one that will itself need constant watching.

Social Media and Law Enforcement

Social media is quickly becoming a feature of police department websites as well as the websites of individual officers. There are Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that identify specific departments or individuals within law enforcement. On balance, this is beneficial in the same way that such pages are for the public at large. They increase access to information, and allow account-holders to craft the image they wish to present to the public, their friends, coworkers, associates, and whoever else reads what they have posted. But the flip side of the coin is that criminals, both individual and organized, can do the same thing. In fact both camps are increasingly reading each other’s posting and tweets (Levine, 2011).

There are two main question to consider: will the social media revolution give an advantage to one side at the expense of the other; or, more specifically, does it help the criminals more than the cops? And will the changes wrought by these forces require a radical change in the scope of our laws, and indeed interpretation of the constitution itself? In other words, will we be less free in order to suppress criminals on the Web and on their phones; or will those tools enable the police to make us more free by being less subject to crime? At present, we do not know the answers to these questions, but things look distinctly problematical for the public at present.

There are essentially two forms of social media for law enforcement to use: internal and external. The former are websites used only within organizations, accessible through special log-in procedures, either on-site or through the Web and requiring a special hardware device (a dongle). Some of these websites are the standard internal ones that you would expect from any organization. The external services are the typical ones we already know and use: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Finally, there are hybrid sites, which we can expect more of in the future. A representative example (and perhaps the only notable one at present) is Facewatch, deliberately playing off the name Facebook. This system, which is currently found principally in London, is apparently so new it lacks a Wikipedia article. It is both a mobile and desktop app that was designed to help businesses fight crime. Using the UK’s ubiquitous closed circuit TV (CCTV) system, as well as the standard private systems, registrants can use Facewatch to report non-emergency crimes on their premises (such as theft and vandalism) without having to go to a police station or waiting for a policeman to arrive. Any images and videos they have of suspects or known perpetrators can be uploaded to the Facewatch site, where they are instantly available for viewing by members of the public. It is stressed on the site that the mere appearance of someone’s picture is not proof or even an indication of guilt. Many of them are mere bystanders who might themselves be able to provide further help but are unaware that a crime has even taken place. This system is — at least so far — showing great promise. Whether it will be able to retain the integrity of its information in the face of organized criminal actions, including hacking and intimidation, is open to question, but this kind of system seems tailor made to fight the phenomenon called flash mobs (Fantz, 2011).

Flash mobs, new enough to still be thought of as a novelty to the millions of people who have yet to witness or be a part of one (or who haven’t yet even heard the term), are a good reason why all law enforcement, particularly local forces, will be called upon to master the tools of social media. Most flash mobs are benign. People, cellphone-connected via Facebook, Twitter, and various emails chains, are invited to appear at some public place to do something, usually silly, like engage in a pillow fight or a silent dance while wearing their iPods and listening to the same song. Flashmob crime is organized the same way, only the intent is to riot and vandalize. But with urban areas increasingly monitored by cameras, services like Facewatch will enable to public — which has a collective interest in fighting crime, especially ones founded on public chaos — to get involved conveniently and safely for free. But it is up to law enforcement to learn how to monitor all the online paths such a flashmob message might follow. They do so now, and will do so more in the future by joining the fun — or at least pretending to.

Police now commonly join all kinds of websites and chat rooms where criminals tend to congregate. It is a staple of crime news for a pedophile or pornographer to be arrested after having arranged a meeting with an intended victim, only to find that the victim was actually a police offer. Gang specialists already monitor the various Twitter and Facebook accounts of individuals who proclaim their gang affiliations. However, urban police, regardless of their nationality, face a common problem: reduced police budgets.

The systematic, ongoing monitoring of social network sites is necessarily be a sedentary activity, and one that requires a good deal of both background specialization, and concentration. In that sense, it can almost be compared to the work that drone pilots do in the military, who sit for hours monitoring the video feeds sent to them by aircraft on the other side of the world. Presently, that work is done by former pilots whose squadrons have been cut back due to budget cuts (Martin, 2011). However, the growth of drone warfare has resulted in more and more “drone pilots” being trained — officers who have not flown actual aircraft. This is beginning to create a cultural divide in the Air Force. An equivalent amount of social-network monitoring would also take law enforcement personnel off the streets at a time when they too can be ill afforded. And training ‘social network officers’ would, no doubt, bring its own cultural divide. But the police have a resource that the armed forces do not: volunteers.

Police have long used volunteers to work in the background onsite at police stations, processing paperwork and doing other administrative chores of a non-urgent kind. There is no reason why people with an interest in this kind of police work can’t be trained to monitor various web pages and Twitter feeds from both home and onsite. Indeed they would need little technical training at all. What would be needed is people willing to learn the deep background of whatever corner of the criminal world they would be trolling through. The information they glean from surfing the Web could then be transmitted on up the chain of command. One interesting aspect of this is the extent to which former criminals themselves could be co-opted to participate as a way of reducing their sentence while on parole.  Another source of volunteers would be students of criminology, who could conceivably earn course credits through this kind of hands-on work/study. The question is how far this should go. Any sort of official monitoring of social media will inevitably bring with it civil rights abuses. Social media websites themselves, already under pressure from both the police and defense attorneys, often refuse to cooperate beyond providing the bare minimum amount of information presently required. That requirement may change in the future, but there is an additional danger as well.

Recently, the Virginia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union warned the Virginian State Police that requiring job applicants to make available their social media accounts (including their passwords) during the hiring process could be a violation of federal law and the U.S. constitution. Virginia’s State Police Superintendent replied such information is necessary to complete a background check on applicants. One can see the problem: as word of this kind of requirements becomes known to the general public looking for jobs, they will be tempted to start using multiple accounts for services like Facebook. But that brings its own problems.

Under a 1986 law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, originally designed to punish computer hacking but gradually expanded by Congress over the years, the Obama Administration wants to make it a felony to register on Facebook using a false name, the grounds being that using a false name is a violation of the Terms of Service (TOS). Already there have been prosecutions of individuals who used false names in order to commit other crimes, but now the Justice Department wants such a false registration to be a crime ipso facto and potentially grounds for prosecution. Which means that you can either risk a federal prosecution for creating two Facebook accounts — one for fun, the other for work — or forget about getting a job in an increasing number of places because you got drunk one night and ranted online.

This is the problem with the police and social media: so many people technically misuse social media websites, for so many different reasons (many of them with no criminal intent or harm done) it becomes progressively easier for prosecutors to target such individuals. Prosecutors’ motivation is that they advance their careers by winning cases. Many social media cases would be very easy to prosecute, given that the defendants, being ordinary citizens, would be desperate to avoid an arrest or trial. Prosecutors have a very good outward justification for this strategy: national security. That blanket imperative makes it progressively easier to take on computer-cases that no one would have bothered with earlier. What will happen when a prosecutor has one typical low-level violation of a TOS on the one hand, and a difficult-to-prosecute case of a violent criminal who happened not to have violated his TOS? This kind of judgment call is analogous to the rationale that encourages the police to prosecute non-violent drug dealers and their customers in order to have their assets seized and sold, with the proceeds distributed to the department that made the bust. The process is potentially self-corrupting.

In conclusion, the use of social media is increasingly standard operating police procedure, and I see no legal or moral reason for this not to continue. Indeed, the police are making up for lost time and in my view that is a good thing, on balance. But we must view the future clearly and with a good measure of skepticism too. The police and their prosecutors must not be allowed to become their own worst enemies — and ours.

References

Fantz, A. (2011, Aug 18). Police scramble to fight flash-mob mayhem august 18, 2011. By Ashley Fantz, CNN . Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2011-08-18/us/flashmobs.police_1_flash-mob-law-enforcement-police-scramble?_s=PM:US

Levine, M. (2011 , May 2011). Officials warn facebook and twitter increase police vulnerability. Retrieved from Officials Warn Facebook and Twitter Increase Police Vulnerability

Martin, R. (2011, Nov 29). Drone pilots: The future of aerial warfare. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142858358/drone-pilots-the-future-of-aerial-warfare