Po Po on the Social Media Judo

Imagine if you saw a CSI episode where the detectives were on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram the entire episode.  Pretty unusual right?  Well that's actually what's happening at police headquarters all across the nation.  Criminals are people, and in today's society it's pretty hard not to be connected to social media.  It's an addiction!  Criminals and suspects are "checking in", uploading photos, sending Snap Chats that record your location based on your phone's GPS.  They are leaving behind a cookie (yes pun intended) crumb trail for officer to be able to follow them.  Using this information, the police have been able to locate and identify criminals out of hiding (Knell 2013).  Pretty late to the game, police department would have been able to use social media much earlier, but many officer had issues with media literacy (ability to understand and effectively use social media outlets) (Kelly 2012). 

According to Heather Kelly in her article, "Police Embrace Social Media as Crime-Fighting Tool", Facebook was the most popular and easiest tool for officers to use to find criminals, suspects, and evidence.  Facebook which now has approximately 1.59 billion user claims that there is no longer a six degree of separation between people in the world.  The theory of six degrees of separation was a claim by mathematicians that everyone in this world is only within six people away from everyone else.  As it turns out, it is only a 3.74 degrees of separation.  What does this mean?  It means that the world is getting smaller and smaller due to social media.  We as a human society is more interconnected than we could have ever imagined before.  This shows us that the new media markets will continue to shift to social media and advertising heavily on social media.   Ever since police started heavily trafficking social media outlets, there were people worried that some social media outlet would taper off due to privacy violations, but this has yet to happen (Sterbenz 2013).   Just like many new jobs that have been created in the past decade have been Social Media Marketing jobs, there are now many police stations that hire teenager to show the police all the applications and functions of social media creating more jobs that we probably couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. 

Sources

Barnes, Susan B.. "A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States." First Monday [Online], 11.9 (2006): n. pag. Web. 25 Jan. 2017

Kelly, Heather. "Police Embrace Social Media as Crime-fighting Tool." CNN. Cable News Network, 30 Aug. 2012. Web. 22 Jan. 2017.

Knell, Noelle. "Pinterest Helps Police Catch Criminals." Governing Magazine: State and Local Government News for America's Leaders. Governing, 3 Jan. 2013. Web. 23 Jan. 2017.

Rose, C. (2011). The security implications of ubiquitous social media. International Journal of Management and Information Systems, 15(1), 35-40. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/855808114?accountid=7082

Sterbenz, Christina. "Cops Are Creating Totally Bogus Facebook Profiles Just So They Can Arrest People." Business Insider. Business Insider, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Jan. 2017.

Westin, A. F. (2003), Social and Political Dimensions of Privacy. Journal of Social Issues, 59: 431–453.