The Police Discover Social Media

Jimmy McNulty, meet Facebook.

For decades, police have relied on informants, investigation and intuition to dismantle criminal networks. We have pictures in our heads of detectives like the Wire’s Detective McNulty tackling particularly complicated family crime empires with photos tacked to bulletin boards. Now, they have social networks to build these webs for them, too.

An Associated Press story this week does a good job examining the impact of social media on crime and policing. Cops and prosecutors are increasingly using Facebook wall posts, MySpace pages and YouTube videos to trace criminal connections and gang membership. Meanwhile, statements made on social websites are increasingly being used as evidence in court.

"You find out about people you never would have known about before," says Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. "You build this little tree of people."

Of course, social networks won’t replace investigations, but police are smart to use them as a tool. If a thief is stupid enough to log into Facebook from the house he’s burglarizing, he deserves to get caught. When a gang member brags about committing a violent crime, it should spark an investigation.

Two concerns spring to mind, however.

One is the potential for wrongful accusation. Anybody who uses Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any number of other social sites knows that most of what goes on there is just ... talk. It's easy to imagine a teenager bragging about a crime on MySpace that they didn't commit, claiming imaginary gang membership or pointing blame falsely and recklessly. It's easy to talk on the web, and though police and courts should consider conversations on Facebook walls to be evidence, they should take digital claims and confessions with a grain of salt.

Another concern is the chilling effect on speech that police monitoring of social networks could have, and the temptation judges will face to deny suspects and parolees access to the Internet. I wrote about this issue last year, after a British judge ruled that alleged gang members couldn't appear together in photos. Others have been denied access to MySpace and additional pages entirely.

While denying access to certain websites may sometimes be necessary, we need to be careful of the limitations we put on communication because of threats and chatter on the web. Like judges who deny convicted sex offenders access to the Internet, we need to ensure that these restrictions don't go too far, hurting a parolee's job chances or socialization by blocking the chance to use powerful communication tools.

Social media has become a valuable tool for police, but any evidence obtained through those methods should also carry an asterisk.

Photo Credit: mistersnappy