The Police Should Be On Facebook

Where you live really does matter. The South is different from the North. The West is different from the East Coast. The differences go beyond the individuals who live in these neighborhoods. Rather the differences are the structures that entangle the different neighborhoods. Some people interact with a group of people so much that they develop their own dialect of the national language. Someone who is from rural Tennessee may speak vastly different when compared with someone from the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. Nowadays there are websites that show you where sex offenders live. When a sex offender moves into a new neighborhood he must inform others that he is moving in. So, individuals, perhaps a single mother, may feel uncomfortable living near a sex offender. So that single mother may move as a result. The important thing here to realize is the location is crucial to understanding contexts. I found interesting Sampson's point that internet crime largely matters on location. If someone wants to meet up with another person and commit a crime to spatial proximity is incredibly important (Sampson 239). If an individual lives too far from another individual they will not meet up, and the potential for crime goes down. Internet crime may happen from countries away, such is the case with white collar crime. But in general, internet crime "opportunities for contact increase with physical propinquity and social interactions may in turn concatenate along chains of contact, with their influences ultimately felt away from the geographic point of origin" (Sampson 239-240). The important thing is that spatial proximity is important for internet crime. Where you live matters, maybe more in this internet age.

Nowadays social media is very important for preventing crime. Twitter has been shown to be an indicator of crime. Oftentimes before something happens an individual will Tweet or post on Facebook about the action. If the police are paying attention they can send officers to the place where the action is supposed to happen, in the process preventing crime from happening. Individuals in gangs use Twitter and Facebook to make threats. Police should investigate the credibility of these threats. If correctly identified, violence could be avoided. This deterrence would be a rousing victory for police departments.

          Of course the digital age brings extreme scrutiny to police departments. Because the world is becoming increasingly videotaped it is vital for the police to be aware of their surroundings. One must understand the structures surrounding a neighborhood. Does the neighborhood have social cohesion? Is it a disordered community? All these questions are important for the police to take into consideration when deciding on the best course of action to combat crime. The personality that a neighborhood takes on is evident on social media. For example just look at different named WiFi’s. WiFi in bad neighborhoods often will be named profane names. WiFi’s in nice neighborhoods often will either not be named or else will have names like OstwaldFamilyWiFi.

This is just one example of how media helps demonstrate how a neighborhood functions.

          The point is that spatial proximity is key to social media. The internet connects people thousands of miles away. But it also is a representation of how a community operates, what it believes and how it works. A neighborhood with a large population of Latinos may have WiFi names in Spanish. While this connection is a bit of a stretch it demonstrates that spatial proximity matters. The internet is an enabler. It can either enable the public to have a negative view of the police or a positive one. Either way spatial proximity is important when taking into variables such as social media which effect criminal activity in different neighborhoods in a community. So while Facebook may be something fun to look at during the day it also may be an important tool for police departments.

This seemingly would help community policing because the police learn more about the structures of a neighborhood which influences an individual’s actions. These structures are important because they represent a neighborhood and whether or not that neighborhood is disorganized. So it seems that perhaps an effective crime fighting measure may be to devote police officers to monitor social media interactions.

http://www.nw3c.org/docs/whitepapers/criminal-use-of-social-media.pdf