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In a story about the Boca Raton, Fla., Police Department’s use of Twitter, Nixle, and other social media to inform the public, Lynn University Professor, Jim Brosemer stated, “The police department has a certain point of view and of course they want to put their best face in front of the public.” Of course, he is insinuating that the police department, through this new technology, is able to bypass traditional media and present their interpretation of crime information directly to the public. Professor Brosemer adds, “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”
But whether or not the Boca Raton Police are “bypassing” traditional media or not, the fact of the matter remains that in the new world of social media, traditional news reporting may have less of an impact on crime information.
Reporting for Ratings
For many years, broadcast and print media were the gatekeepers of crime information. They chose what crimes to emphasize, and what to say about them. They chose which law enforcement issues to highlight and which ones to minimize. Some may say that the news media adage, “if it bleeds, it leads,” although cynical, represents what a number of Americans feel is traditional media’s attitude toward crime reporting. Unfortunately the type of reporting whose goal is sensationalism for the sake of ratings, or increased readership, is all about shock, fear, and criticism, not about a fair-handed and informative look at local crime.
Law Enforcement Talks Directly to the Public
But now that law enforcement has the tools to speak directly to the public, they have the ability to create a broader, more-comprehensive picture of local crime and crime trends. For example, since the Boca Raton Police started using Twitter and Nixle, they have stopped giving press releases to local media in advance. Now they send out press releases via social media and local news learns about them at the same time as all other citizens in the area. Using public-facing crime maps, like partnering with CrimeReports, also gives the public direct access to crime information. Instead of relying on the nightly news to tell citizens that there have a been a rash of break-ins, citizens can now look at the map themselves and determine if it truly is a “rash” or if it is really 4 break-ins in the last month, spread out across three townships.
Obviously, this level of access to crime information has never before been available to the public. The power to interpret crime data has now moved out of the hands of the traditional media gatekeepers and into the hands of citizens themselves. And, perhaps, that IS a good thing.
For more on this topic: Traditional Media Loses Grip on Local Crime Information, Pt. 2
Get on the map at CrimeReports.com
I received an email this morning from a reader who, contrary to previous articles posted here at The Crime Map, expressed that surveillance cameras DO, in fact, prevent crime. He added that cameras prevent crime by putting criminals behind bars, preventing them from re-offending.
Surveillance
Although it is certainly true that surveillance cameras, or CCTV, have helped catch criminals in the past (keeping them off the street), many citizens and lawmakers questions the overall effectiveness of a surveillance camera system. For example, a recent story published by the BBC stated that for every 1,000 cameras in London, only one criminal was caught with the technology last year. However, with over 1 million cameras, that still adds up to 1,000 criminals caught with the aid of CCTV. But, are 1,000 criminals worth the 500 million pounds spent on maintaining the cameras every year? The number spent on maintaining the system equates out to 500,000 British pounds per criminal caught last year, which converts to over $833,000 per criminal in US dollars.
In America, a system that spent $833,000 to catch one criminal would be deemed a huge waste of taxpayer money. Despite the fact that a significant amount of criminals are caught by surveillance cameras, the amount of resources it takes to install and maintain the technology far outweighs the comparatively small return.
Communication
But there might be better ways to put our tax dollars to work. Although the invention of cameras have allowed police to watch more of our neighborhoods from afar, and patrol cars have given police the ability to move faster and cover larger areas, police are less and less inclined to actually build relationships with members of the community. Lawrence Sherman, quoted in Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, says “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”
It is the shift from active policing to passively waiting that has, perhaps, most damaged citizen’s relationship with law enforcement. It has put officers at arms length, out of sight, and out of mind. As a result, citizens see law enforcement as the specter that approaches when bad things happen (or the Big Brother who is watching them through a surveillance camera), not the partner that they interact with to prevent crime in their community. To prevent this Us vs. Them relationship between citizens and law enforcement, a communication shift needs to take place.
Already that shift is taking place through the rise of law enforcement agencies embracing social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and CrimeReports. Although a neighborhood police officer may not be walking your street, they are slowly becoming more accessible online. These new communication tools give average citizens better access to crime data, information, and two-way communication, but they do not fully replace the advantages of foot patrol officers.
The Future Technology-Assisted, Community-based Law Enforcement Efforts
Just a few days ago, the Baltimore Police Department announced it would be issuing BlackBerries to all of its officers in the coming months, virtually making patrol-car-laptops obsolete overnight. With this new technology, officers have less reason to stay close to their patrol cars and have more freedom to move around on foot easier. Perhaps technology has brought us the next shift in law enforcement: a return to widespread neighborhood foot patrol officers, who leverage personal relationships in the community and online communication tools to prevent crime in their community.
Instead of reinforcing an Us vs. Them mentality through increased surveillance, maybe we should put more actual (instead of virtual) eyes in our neighborhoods to build relationships and foster community empowerment and responsibility through community-based relationships between citizens and law enforcement.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Recently, in Atlanta, a couple posted a surveillance video on YouTube of three men burglarizing their home. Soon after, the three men were caught. It’s just one of the ways that social media is helping to decrease crime.
Social Media Increases Communication
The rise of web 2.0 and social media has enabled everyone to communicate faster and easier than ever before in the history of the planet. And these new communication tools are useful for more than just telling all your Facebook friends that you’re having spaghetti for dinner, they are having an impact on real-world situations, including crime.
Communication Decreases Crime
As little as 10 years ago, communicating with your local police department was a difficult, time-consuming process. Sure, citizens could read about crime in the weekly police blotter in the newspaper, or maybe hear about a handful of high-profile crimes on the local news, but to find out about crime in one’s own neighborhood required slogging down to the station, filling out paper work, and waiting. Likewise, police could do little to inform the public about crime in their area, save going door-to-door to tell everyone in the neighborhood what was going on.
Today, police and citizens have virtual two-way communication through web 2.0 technology like CrimeReports, Twitter, Facebook, or even text messaging. And as the avenues of communication increase, crime decreases. Eric Baumer, a criminologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee said, “It’s interesting in the sense that [crime has gone down] while the ability of citizens to surveil and connect to police” has gone up.
Citizens Want to Connect
When citizens have the ability to communicate and connect with their local law enforcement, they use it. If going down to the station to request crime reports was too time consuming in the past, now citizens can simply go to CrimeReports and see crime with a few clicks of a mouse or follow their local PD on Twitter.
With ease of communication comes more widespread adoption. Now that communication with law enforcement has become easier through web 2.0 tools, more people are tuning in, following, friending, and engaging in the conversation. And when more people are getting the information they need to keep themselves safe, more people are using that knowledge to protect themselves and prevent crime.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Image of a "precog," a psychic used to predict future crime, from the movie Minority Report.
And you thought Minority Report was just another Tom Cruise movie. Philadelphia is now experimenting with a computer system that attempts to predict the likelihood that a parolee will re-offend. Of course, Philadelphia’s system is a far cry from having three psychics locked in a dark basement predicting crimes. Their system relies on a complex computer system that reads an offender’s history, compares it with past parolee data, and predicts the likelihood that the parolee will commit another crime: high, medium, or low.
Currently, the system is not used to keep people in prison, but rather it identifies those who are at a high risk for re-offending, so those offenders can receive special services to help deter them from continuing their violent lifestyles.
Ethical Questions
The system seems altruistic enough for now, but it raises some ethical questions about “predicting” who will and will not commit crimes in the future based on an automated computerized process. Our current justice system is based on the idea that a man is innocent until proven guilty. If an automated computer system is used to label me as “high risk for re-offending,” is that not, in essence, labeling me guilty until proven innocent?
This is not to say that offering special services to those at high risk is a bad idea. In fact, identifying those persons who, historically, have a high risk of returning to their criminal lifestyle and offering them special service is probably a good idea. But if those special services are effective at reducing recidivism, then why not offer them to all parolees?
What “Might” Happen
However, regardless of the effectiveness of the programs that are offered as a result of parolee re-offense risk assessment, a system that automatically predicts a future life of crime for parolees can be a dangerous thing and needs to be handled ethically and with oversight in order for it not to negatively affect the parolee or society at large based on what “might” happen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Get on the map at CrimeReports.com
Not only does law enforcement officially tasked with enforcing the law, but they are also a great resource for public and emergency information. If you are one the progressive agency with an official website, blog, Facebook page, or more, give your citizens resources about the novel H1N1 virus using these free social networking tool from the CDC.
You can download:
- Website badges and buttons
- Ecards
- Link to the CDC Flickr
- Tie into the H1N1 Twitter feed
- Get Videos
- Widgets
- And more . . .
Download all these resources to keep your community safe here: http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/campaigns/h1n1/#Widgets
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
The Baltimore PD will soon issue BlackBerries to virtually all of its officers. The BlackBerries, referred to as “pocket cops,” will allow officers to download real-time information, suspect photos, criminal histories, and more, much quicker and easier than with the laptops in their police cruisers.
In a pilot program, the BlackBerries have already helped officers bring in more criminals. And officials envision the day when laptops in cruisers will become obsolete.
Read more about the program here: http://www.officer.com/online/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=48237
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a story about the Ohio State Patrol issuing strict guidelines for officers’ personal social media accounts. The guidelines come on the heels of a controversy surrounding a female officer posting sexually suggestive photos of herself on her MySpace page. Social media also recently had a hand in circulating a picture taken by Midland, TX, deputies of a scantily-clad waitress holding a police rifle—an incident that led to the firing of one officer and the suspension of four others. Is it any wonder that some law enforcement agencies are wary of endorsing the very media that publicizes their shortcomings?
But, even beyond photo sharing at the click of a button, it doesn’t take to long for anyone to find a video, blog post, or tweet that criticizes local law enforcement or openly publicizes law enforcement missteps and blunders. The fact of the matter is, social media not only opens up a great communication and outreach tool for law enforcement, it also opens up an agency to public criticism and vitriolic rants.
Rants and Personal Grudges
Many agencies want to create a web portal for open, public communication, but opening that portal comes with a whole host of problems. For instance, LEAs want the dialogue to be public, but they also don’t want it to degrade into rants by citizens with personal grudges. They already receive enough public criticism from local media, city councils, and everyday encounters with citizens, and they don’t want to open themselves up to more through a tool that is meant for community outreach and information.
Further, monitoring, editing, or deleting comments, on a Facebook wall or blog, can lead to community outcries of censorship. And a recent PR debacle by the Skittles Company illustrates the dangers of simply opening the gates of social media right on your front page.
Building Trust
Despite these potential pitfalls, opening a social media channel to the public shows great trust in the citizenry at large, and most citizens will respect that. What it all boils down to is trust. When a department shows trust in the community, the community shows trust in the department. Creating a Facebook page, blog, or twitter account sends a message to the public: We want to communicate with you and we care about your feedback. And when an agency sends a message like that, the public is more open to listening to and working with a department.
Simply publishing a public crime map, through a service like CrimeReports, shows citizens that their local police department trusts them with a large amount of crime data. In response, citizens use the information to protect themselves and their community, and are more open to working with law enforcement in their neighborhoods. Opening a two-way dialogue through other social media tools can further expand and enrich that trust, creating a safer community for citizens and a more law-enforcement-friendly public.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
A recent article posted at The Christian Science Monitor, reports that nearly a year after the massive anti-crime protests in Mexico, little has changed to curb crime or to improve relations between citizens and law enforcement. In fact, many residents feel that the crime has gotten worse.
Originally, as a result of the protests, the government promised to “root out corrupt police moonlighting for kidnapping rings, better coordinate police actions, and create more citizen watch groups.” And although the government says it has accomplished its goals, citizens still feel unsafe.
Overcoming a Culture of Not Reporting Crime
The real problem, pointed out by one citizen, is not police corruption itself, but rather Mexico’s culture of not reporting crime. Many citizens do not report crime out of fear of retaliation from criminals, or fear that the police that they report to are corrupt and won’t pay attention anyway. The article points out that as much as 80% of crime goes unreported.
What exists, then, is a massive lack of trust between citizens and law enforcement. This mistrust leads to a culture of fear toward law enforcement. Just like any neighborhood in the United States, if citizens fear the police, they will not work with them to reduce crime—or even report it. The problem of mistrust, then, is the root of the problem.
Quelling Fear Through Anonymity and Technology
Fear and mistrust are bred from secrecy. One of the ways that Mexico can encourage citizens to trust police is to open up crime data to the public. Illuminemos (“Light Up Mexico”), an organization dedicated to reducing crime in Mexico, has reportedly published a crime map to combat the lack of information from police (although, I have not been able to find it). Nevertheless, public-facing crime mapping could prove a useful public relations tool for a government trying to instill its citizens with trust in law enforcement. Pushing actual crime data to a publicly available site not only gives citizens the information they need to track crime and protect themselves, but opening the data up to the public shows that the government trust the public with the information. If the government offers an olive branch, through public-facing crime mapping, they prove that they are not hiding anything and that they are actively seeking citizen participation in reducing crime.
In addition, some citizens do not report crime for fear of retaliation. CiviRep, a pioneering SMS crime reporting system has been deployed in Venezuela (read more about it here). The system allows citizens to use cell phones to anonymously report crime from any location. The crime info is sent to local police who can respond and map crime in real time. A similar system, deployed in Mexico, could help quell the fear of retaliation and increase crime reporting dramatically.
Deployment
Granted, there are some technological issues to overcome in deploying public crime mapping and text message crime reporting. For instance, because addresses in Mexico are not clearly defined or regulated, mapping by address could be a problem, forcing police to map crime by GPS coordinates. In addition, the money may not be available to build or maintain these systems. However, working toward these technological solutions to reduce crime and create openness could provide a positive return on investment for citizens and the Mexican government
UPDATE: The Illuminemos map can be found here: http://www.mapadelincuencial.org.mx/zonas_de_riesgo.php (Thanks to reader lewis shepherd for the tip)
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Gov Tech just published an interview with California’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Mark Weatherford, in which he elaborated on some of his plans for implementing IT security across the state. In regards to security concerns for government-based social networking, he said the following:
“We’re going to jump out in front of this and get something in place that allows state employees to use social networks. It’s going to be my job to figure out how we can safely and securely implement these technologies in state agencies because in a couple of years we’re not going to have this discussion anymore. This is going to happen. We just need to make sure we’re doing it properly.”
State governments are beginning to realize that social networking is not a fad, but represent a fundamental shift in the way that citizens communicate and interact with their government. Local government and law enforcement need to have a similar attitude: “This is going to happen. We just need to make sure we’re doing it properly.”
Using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, or Web 2.0 tools like CrimeReports is the first step.
Source: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/717247?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=link
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Adoption of open-data initiatives by law enforcement spurs widespread interest in public crime-mapping solutions
Today, St. Petersburg, Fla., becomes the 500th law enforcement agency to share crime data with the public through CrimeReports.com, the world leader in online crime mapping. St. Petersburg joins other forward-thinking agencies like Los Angeles County, Washington DC, Boston, Baltimore, Omaha, Portland, and 499 other communities of all sizes across North America that have chosen to inform and engage their citizens through timely, block-level crime data. As well, nearly 100 additional agencies have signed onto to the CrimeReports network in the past 90 days and will appear on the map in the coming weeks.
“We look forward to building stronger relationships with citizens, as we share crime information and work together to prevent and reduce crime in our community,” said Chief Charles Harmon. “CrimeReports is enabling us to get crime information to our citizens quickly, easily, and affordably.”
The city’s 250,000 residents can now more fully benefit from the St. Petersburg Police Department’s continued commitment to cutting–edge technology and community outreach efforts. And local neighborhood watch efforts have gained an invaluable tool that will enable them to work more closely with officers to keep their communities safe.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly turning to web 2.0 technology and social networking tools to fulfill the Obama administration’s call for innovation through more open data at all levels of government and law enforcement. This rapid adoption of open-data initiatives has pushed CrimeReports to the front of the online crime-mapping industry.
“Not only is this a milestone for CrimeReports, but our growth is indicative of a larger push by law enforcement agencies to inform and communicate with their communities,” said Greg Whisenant, founder and CEO of CrimeReports. “We simply supply law enforcement agencies with cost-effective, easy-to-use tools to accomplish their goals.”
CrimeReports launched in mid-2007, with only one law-enforcement partner. Today, it is the largest and most-comprehensive online crime-mapping service in the world. CrimeReports’ innovative solutions have allowed law enforcement agencies to communicate with local citizens more cost-effectively than any other solution on the market. And with a recent $7.2 million joint funding infusion from Austin Ventures and vSpring Capital, CrimeReports is expanding its offerings with Command Central, a powerful crime-analytics tool for law enforcement agencies and will introduce other web-based law enforcement and community watch tools in the near future.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
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