Todd Piett is the chief product officer at Rave Mobile Safety / Smart911.com . He writes about technology trends in public safety and enhanced 9-1-1. Todd is a board member of the NG9-1-1 Institute and is a member of APCO’s Emerging Technology Committee, in addition to holding numerous technology patents.

We post eight years of video to YouTube every day. We send 200 million tweets per day. And on average, 250 million photos are uploaded each day to Facebook.

As social has moved into the mainstream, public safety has at times embraced it and at other times rejected it as a means of communication with citizens. According to the results of a September 2011 survey conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police Center for Social Media, 88.1% of the 800 law enforcement agencies that responded utilize social media in some capacity.

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There are several common public safety and law enforcement applications of social media — dissemination of public information, employee recruitment/background checking of prospective candidates, crime investigations, and intelligence gathering, to name a few. Increasingly, however, public safety organizations are utilizing publicly available social data for investigative and forensic purposes.

Forensic Social Media

Forensic analysis of social data is performed post-incident. Naturally, investigators will gravitate to where the evidence exists — in this case, sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and others. Although the photo and video evidence is sometimes posted by the criminals themselves, investigators can also utilize information posted by others to both strengthen a case and even identify the perpetrator of a crime.

In speaking with numerous police chiefs, I’m amazed by the technological savvy of traditional “gangs” which utilize social media to both intimidate victims online as well as coordinate offline activities, such as recruiting new members. Leading public safety agencies have integrated investigation of online communities into their crime solving techniques, identifying accomplices who may communicate with one another through social media or even collecting communications threads directly related to an event and implicating individuals. Criminals have done many investigative teams a favor by bragging online (and sometimes even posting photos and videos!) of the crimes they have perpetrated, as reported in the clip below.







The efforts currently underway by police in Vancouver, BC provide an excellent example of an investigation leveraging social media to identify those responsible for the Stanley Cup riots in 2011. The IRIT (Integrated Riot Investigation Team), comprised of members of eight different law enforcement agencies, has posted photographs of over 100 suspected rioters on its website, along with a simple electronic means for the public to identify a rioter. The images were compiled by reviewing in excess of 1,600 hours of digital evidence — everything from surveillance video to publicly-accessible online photos and videos. The public was also encouraged to submit additional photo or video evidence that it had access to. As of January 23, 2012 over 30 of the suspects on the IRIT website have been identified.

Privacy Concerns

Of course, as with every technology employed by law enforcement, concerns about "Big Brother" inevitably arise. What is the expectation of privacy around social media? If I tweet “Jack deserves to get a beating for that one,” is that an admission of guilt? What if I only direct message someone as a joke but they retweet it to a broader audience and it incites action? What if I only post it on Facebook for my friends?

The January 23 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Jones determined that police violated a suspected narcotics trafficker’s Fourth Amendment rights when they attached a GPS device to his vehicle, outside the scope of the warrant they had obtained, and monitored his movements for a period of 28 days. How different is that from a law enforcement official friending me or following me and recording my communications?

Consider the recent January 19 attack on the Department of Justice website. Did the simple act of using the hashtag #OpPayBack to communicate on Twitter about the event open up users for investigation? Did they have to claim involvement or simply express support to be implicated?

The arguments quickly become grey and the legal boundaries have yet to be drawn, but as social media becomes more integral to everyone's communications, public safety agency techniques and the associated laws will have to adapt. As our communication preferences morph, so too must public safety tools and strategies.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Jirsak