Missing in action I recently posted about the increasing number of ways that social media is being used for social good – including saving the lives of human rights workers. Now social media – and Twitter in particular – is becoming the mainstream way of locating missing people. I was slightly surprised when I reviewed...
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Criminals and law enforcement officials both make use of new technologies and social media in particular to outwit each other. This week’s post focuses on how gangs use social media and how police respond. Gangs use social media to brag Gang members use the whole range of social media platforms to spread inflammatory messages...
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Hold the front page Crime has always been front page news. Always sold newspapers. The advent of TV – remember the real time coverage of OJ Simpson’s arrest – accelerated the speed with which news spread: And social media has ensured that bad news goes global in minutes – as anyone following the Oscar...
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The iPlod generation is growing all the time There was a bit of a backlash against the police use of social media, particularly Twitter, towards the end of 2012 with many of us feeling that @J_amesP was unfairly picked on. We wish him well in 2013, but it’s clear that although police services and...
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To ease us all into 2013, I thought it was time for another round up of bizarre social media and law enforcement stories.. Three stories have taken my eye recently. 1. The Dopey Drug Dealer Ever made that classic mobile phone mistake when you send the same text to everyone in your address book?...
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I have posted regularly about the ways in which the police are increasingly using social media, not just to engage with local communities but to gather intelligence and pursue investigations. The iPlod generation is mainly self-taught but developing a more sophisticated approach each month. However, the UK is still playing catch up with the...
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The UK government is currently undertaking a review of the probation service and is encouraging probation trusts to be innovative in responding to fundamental change. Jason Davies’s (@b00tstrapper) post shows that there’s plenty of innovation in the current probation service. SWM Probation Trust’s adventures in mapping, phone apps and pecha kucha. It’s Wednesday afternoon,...
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Stop and search has always been a friction point between police and the communities they serve. Indeed several commentators cited it as a potential contributory factor to last year’s riots. The New York equivalent “Stop-and-Frisk” has proved equally contentious with almost 700,000 people questioned on the city’s streets last year. The vast majority were...
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My recent series on how to make the most of Twitter for workers in the criminal justice system created a decent amount of interest among police, probation and legal staff but very little from those working in prison. This is entirely unsurprising since people inside generally don’t have access to mobile phones or the...
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In the near future, will police officers be able to use their mobile phone to photograph you at the roadside and then instantly run your photo through a database of known criminals? These thoughts were prompted by a fascinating article by @paulxharris in this weekend’s Observer on the possibility of applying face recognition software...
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