This morning Twitter and Facebook lit up with mentions of an article that appeared in the UK via The BBC.
Chief Constable Alex Marshall, head of the College of Policing had this to say;
“As people have moved their shopping online and their communications online, they’ve also moved their insults, their abuse and their threats online, so I see that it won’t be long before pretty much every investigation that the police conduct will have an online element to it.
“It’s a real problem for people working on the front line of policing, and they deal with this every day.
“So in a typical day where perhaps they deal with a dozen calls, they might expect that at least half of them, whether around antisocial behaviour or abuse or threats of assault may well relate to social media, Facebook, Twitter or other forms.”
While this is a completely shocking number…50% of all front-line policing calls have a relationship to social media, it’s really not that bad, yet.
Having been on the front-line of policing and having responded to and or advised of calls that were generated from social media posts and interactions, the number of actual crimes are much less than fifty percent.
Some are clear-cut. Threats between people involved in relationship, contact through social media when there is a court or release order prohibiting it, bullying that has moved into the realm of threats and or harassment, evidence of a crime contained in a post. Those crimes are readily apparent and don’t change the police work involved. Front-line gets the call, does a preliminary investigation and follows through based on the evidence presented.
Here is the grey area put succinctly by an officer in the article,
“A lot of the time.. it’s that whole attitude of, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’ll call the police, they’ll sort it out for me.’
“It should be a case of let’s be sensible, let’s not be friends with that person on Facebook, perhaps contact Facebook first or don’t use Facebook. It’s common-sense stuff.”
The reason it’s so grey? It has to be looked into to ensure there is no back story, no history and no chance that threats are truly believed to be real. Not to mention the number of times people will call for police because they received a scam email or social media phishing scam that they want thoroughly investigated even if no crime had been committed.
Chief Marshall agreed,
“People throughout history have shouted abuse at each other and had disagreements and arguments and possibly said things that they regret later and the police have never investigated every disagreement between everyone,”
I think that there truly needs to be data collection specific to the calls for service generated from social media. Using a number like 50% of all front-line policing screams problematic if that number is not reality. That kind of number can have significant consequences on budgets, human resources, resource allocation and training.
Police certainly need to recognize the issue and prepare for it with training and education for both their members and the communities served. When resources are already stretched thin, you can’t possibly dedicate 50% of your front line efforts to dealing with calls for service because someone needs help dealing with a phishing scam. As the UK refer to them, “Anti-Social Behaviours online”.
Short answer to go hand in hand with the training for officers to recognize cyber and social media related information and evidence collection is a look at two tier policing unit designed as a clearing house.
A unit that would vet non-emergency calls and provide over the phone or email based solutions and advice with its own investigative branch before having to initiate a formal police response.
Via @NBC News, Oakland
Some agencies are already doing this, but again, looking at resource stretched policing tax dollars, do police officers need to do this?
Finally, here is a great counter piece to the both what I have written here and the original article from the BBC.
Fact-check: is “half” of police work really related to social media?
What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments below…maybe your idea could become the solution.
