As noted elsewhere on Future Crimes, law enforcement organizations throughout the world are increasingly using technology to serve the public. Most such initial efforts were nothing more than one-way public relations activities, such as the police chief hosting a web page with his biography and photograph.
During law enforcement’s initial first-generation foray onto the Internet, the conversation was very much one-way: from the police to the public. Now, however, with the advent of social media and Web 2.0, more and more citizens are rightfully forcing themselves into the conversation with their public safety officials.
Whether through iPhone applications, Facebook pages or as noted below via Twitter, police agencies are increasingly actually providing services via social media. Recently the City of San Francisco launched SF311 on Twitter, a site that allowed residents to report non-emergency requests for police and other municipal services. Unlike first generation internet policing, the City of San Francisco is allowing for an engaging two-way conversation between its citizenry and the local government.
Using SF311, citizens can request various services including graffiti removal and street cleaning or they can report issues of public disorder such as dangerous potholes and abandoned vehicles. They can even send tweets with photos of the problem using various third-party applications. The city has also taken to using Twitter as a means of sharing breaking public safety information, such as traffic street closures and major road accidents. As of mid-March 2010, the city of San Francisco’s Twitter site had over 5,500 followers, with 1,500 signing-up within in the first few days of service.
Each request for service was logged into a database and the resident was given a tracking number so he or she could follow-up with the City on the status of the request. The city has gone to good lengths to explain the service to the public on its web page and made a clear distinction on what information is public and what is private. For example, one would perhaps not want to publicly tweet the following to the police: “My name is Harriet Jones. I live at 1212 Main street and my neighbor Karl Schmidt is a drug dealer/crime lord.” Such a tweet might not only anger Mr. Schmidt, but could subject Ms. Jones to obvious danger.
Unfortunately, members of the public using Twitter for the first time might not understand that difference between a DM (Direct Message), such as d SF311 and a publicly-visible Tweet sent via the @SF311 method. As such, strong public education on the appropriate use of these technologies will be required to ensure some elderly woman reporting on the gang-member next door is not murdered in retaliation for her Tweet.
One other serious question that must be dealt with as law enforcement agencies move into the “Twittersphere” is the issue of trust. How does a citizen know that the Twitter page for the San Francisco Police Department is actually that of the San Francisco Police? Couldn’t Bob your neighbor, who always wanted to be a cop anyway, just create his own account on Twitter, leading to unsuspecting citizens erroneously providing their trusted private information to Bob? This of course is not a problem just on Twitter, but across the wide spectrum of social media such as Facebook, Youtube and MySpace.
Twitter has recently instituted a beta “Verified Account” feature in an effort to prevent identity confusion and impersonation and to ensure that customers interacting with a verified account are in fact communicating with the “real thing.” Thus bona fide accounts will include a ‘Verified Account’ badge in the top-right portion of a user’s profile page. Of course anybody who has ever been to a phishing site of their favorite bank knows information like this is notably easy to spoof. That said, Twitter should be commended for implementing this feature, which will no doubt grow in robustness over time.
In the interim, however, some police twitter accounts have already been spoofed, including the New South Wales Police Service in Australia. The site was created and run for several months by a police impersonator as a publicity stunt for a technology marketing company. The company, which was offering public safety messages on their Twitter feed, only revealed their true identity when NSW police became curious to determine which one of their officers had established the account. It was at that point the company came forth, admitting that they created the police account and then agreed to surrender it to the legitimate police service.
Though no charges were filed in the New South Wales case, it is important to determine what criminal penalties should be attached for people that abuse these technologies.
The above cases poses a number of other interesting questions. Firstly, while the “public safety advice” dispensed in the NSW case was mostly harmless, what liability might the company or an individual incurred if they had tweeted “@NSWPolice: New Legal Blood Alcohol Limit Raised to 1.2 percent. 5 pints new maximum when driving.”
In yet another example, one might ask what panic might be caused if the 1,000 people following a spoofed/fake NYPD Twitter feed were to read: “@NYPD: Explosion in lower Manhattan, immediately evacuate city.” What panic might ensure and how many could be potentially injured from such a fake story, which would be akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater–except in this case, the shouting occurred in the crowded Twittersphere, purportedly from a most trusted source.
Many societies have long-prohibited impersonating a police officer and ever year hundreds of such arrests are effected for individuals that wrongfully and without authority wear police uniforms or utilize police badges. Most such statutes classify these offenses as serious felonies, given the obvious public safety implications. To-date, however, these laws have not yet been tested against police impersonation via social media, though surely the call for such regulation will inevitably be forthcoming.
As seen above, social media have great potential to expand and improve the quality of citizen-police interaction. Cities such as San Francisco, Boston and others have been early adopters of these technologies and provide a glimpse into the evolving forms of policing in the 21st century. While noted precautions must be exercised and trustworthiness need be clearly be established, the positive implications for public safety through law enforcement’s use of Web 2.0 cannot be ignored.
For further reading, see: Does Your Police Department Tweet?
