Why Do Police Use Social Media?

* Community policing has expanded its horizons with the police use of Twitter, by which officers can send out messages to a large segment of the population.

The media is also another of the greatest challenges for law enforcement. The media never shows the whole story. Chances are the media doesn’t even know the whole story; yet officers are judged by what the media portrays. You can’t hear a news report or even read a newspaper without the race of an individual being identified. This is only fueling the race issue for everyone. It is tearing communities apart. In this aspect, social media appears to be a double edged sword. It can help law enforcement by connecting with the public, tracking criminals, and gathering Intel but it also puts every word or action by an

As much as social media has managed to ruin our society, it plays a positive role for the public as well. Social media allowed people to use their networks as a form of reaching out to old friends and family across the world. With America being known as the melting pot of the world, our society has several people with family on the other side of the Earth. With social media in effect, this permits people to stay in touch with long lost loved ones and keep ties tight. Not only has it sanctioned friends and family to keep in touches but has granted people to relocate birth parents and unknown family members as well. Yes, social media has failed our society greatly but there is always a rainbow somewhere after a rainy day. Social media can play a positive role by bringing people back together.

Social media has taken the world by storm. In the article “When Your Smartphone Is Too Smart for Your Own Good: How Social Media Alters Human Relationships” by Lori Ann Wagner, a researched survey found that 73% of adults online use some type of social networking platform, while 42% use multiple platforms. With social media being seen and used by so many people, is there a problem with it influencing and affecting humans in some sort of way? Many people would argue yes to social media negatively affecting humans, while others disagree to that idea. Social media is seen mostly affecting social relationships between people. Social media should not be used as one’s primary social outlet as it inhibits natural social skills, interferes with face-to-face relationships, and provides empty social connections.

When the people become active in helping the police through social media, they help the police department build a positive reputation. This will generate a more positive feel towards the police and how they are portrayed through the media. Positive vibes are essential, especially in today’s society given how big the Black Lives Matter movement is. With this, there would be more light hearted news segments about the police which could result in a safer environment for the police and the people.

How has social media helped and create problems in the U.S? It has solved a lot of problems on the internet. There are a lot of problems on the internet that can be fixed but don’t get a lot attention. You can always solve problems if you behave and be positive. Social Media has created problems in the U.S. This is why I want this type of project to be talked about.

Social media is especially useful when it comes to investigations. Police officers have learned that, in using social networks to spread certain cases to the public, more information is retrieved. For instance, sending out an image of the criminal to news stations that later display it to the public often leads to feedback about the whereabouts of the criminal as seen by a citizen. Likewise, through social media accounts, we are more capable of seeing things such as who the criminal associates themselves with, as well as their whereabouts, or places they are likely to go through photo geotagging.

Before the invention of Facebook, twitter, and many others, social media data collection was used by companies to get customers’ impression about their products. However, nowadays with modern technology the game has changed. Following the discoveries of these various social media networks, users are now capable of browsing vast bulk public postings, and others are taking advantage of it to commit crimes. This carnage of online crime has alerted the law enforcement to look ways to tackle it, hence starting to monitor and collect social media data. Collecting of social media data by law enforcement, is gathering of the users’ information, intercepts users’ communications, and analyzes that data to make intelligence determinations. This approach helps to disclose key information or secrets of online crimes to law enforcement. An online crime such as street gang and terrorism is not a new thing in the world today. Currently, terror and gang

The use of social media in law enforcement has been on the rise throughout the U.S. over the past few years. According to the LexisNexis 2014 Social Media Use in Law Enforcement report, eight out of every 10 law enforcement professionals use social media as a tool in investigations, and 25 percent use it every day. The use of social media to help obtain probable cause is widely accepted, the survey shows. Three out of four respondents, or 76 percent, said that, when they used social media as probable cause, it has never been challenged. The percentage is down from 87 percent in 2012.

Police presence within a community can deter crime, along with the police interacting within the communities. If crime has lessened in a particular area, it can be seen that the police are doing their job. With social media what it is today, it is easy to see that Peel’s fifth principle is essential. We read about crime over several different social media sites along with TV and radio. Getting the word out about crime can help the community to help the police in solving the crimes (Bohm & Haley, 2014).

The police have been using social media to catch criminals by creating fake profiles are following around their suspects. This technique is very easy to perform because anyone can create a profile on social media. The police essentially create a spoofed profile and add their suspects as friends to be notified of what they post. This occasionally leads to gathering evidence against their suspects or even getting information about gangs or events. This method is more preferred for police because it is safer than being on the streets. This method can also be more beneficial because criminals nowadays tend to post everything they do on social media. Allowing the authorities to map gang member’s lives and investigate other gang activities.

One of the major roles of the social media in modern policing is acting as an analytical tool. Criminal investigations tend to incorporate use of social media in creating leads towards the suspects . This is mainly because most people have the tendency in updating their whereabouts on social media and even it is possible to know the character of someone by accessing their accounts.

Having access to socal media can make crowdsourcing bad on an investigation. People use the internet and social media to do their own detective work by pointing out who they think has done the crime. They are downloading altered pictures on sites like Facebook and accusing innocent people. “Social media is a huge resource”(Erickson, Christine, 2012) reaching a lot of people. For instance the investigation of the Boston Marathon Bombing “1,700 users uploaded” pictures from the scene with “suspicous people and packages highlighted” (Powers, M) to a site called “Reddits Find Boston Bombers – formum”(Powers, M). The suspicous people that where highlighted are just innocent people watching the end of the race. Crowdsourcing can cause people to use resources in a negative way by passing on false data. Innocent people get tagged as shaddy because of their religion, what they wear and how they act. These accusations get put on the internet and spread like

Since we are given these incredible tools to communicate, we need to use them. An example of a time that social media was used for good was last year when the Stop Kony campaign was trending on twitter. At it’s most popular time, #StopKony was tweeted more 1200 times a minute. The Stop Kony marketing team created a video as an experiment, having no idea that they would change the

Another advantage of community policing is social media as it gives police and citizens a way to send and receive information to one another with a much broader range than neighborhood watch; which is only limited to a specific community. When police are looking for an offender he or she can reach a nationwide audience by tweeting and/or posting it on his or her social media page so that followers can repost the offender’s information and/or give any helpful information to police to apprehend the offender