Law Enforcement Increasingly Turning to Social Media for Help

Recently it became known that criminals have been using social networking sites to help them rob houses. All they have to do is look at Facebook pages or Twitter feeds and watch for messages such as "…off to visit my grandkids in another state" to know the house will be ripe for the picking. Now, it turns out that law enforcement is using social media to ferret out nefarious characters and to sometimes catch them in act of breaking the law. In one report, according to the L.A. Times, a man stole a laptop then turned it on at a later date and logged into his Facebook account. But because the laptop had been reported stolen, it was easy for the police to get the IP address of the perp and track him down, which they did. He was arrested and booked within hours of stealing the laptop. The Times is also reporting that Detectives in Los Angeles tracked down a couple of juvenile delinquents who had been stealing a lot of stuff and selling it on Craigslist. The kids were dumb enough to actually post pictures of the stolen merchandise. All the cops had to do was contact the seller pretending to be someone that wanted to buy what they were selling.

Apparently, cops all over the country have grown savvy to the ways in which the Internet can help them solve crimes. A couple of years ago, Facebook made a lot of noise about not allowing sex offenders to create accounts with them, though clearly, such criminals wouldn't have to work very hard to get around such restrictions. What's new is that law enforcement personnel are now actively using such sites to keep track of some individuals that they believe pose a risk to their community.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect on this new type of crime solving is the active participation of those that get caught. If they never created a Facebook page, or got on Twitter or set up a Craigslist account, they never would have tracked down and nabbed, but for some reason, they seem to see themselves as invisible when they get online and expose all manner of information that the police can use to track them down. And not only that, many apparently incriminate themselves in the process, such as the boys displaying photographs of stolen merchandise.

It's perhaps a fortuitous thing that so many criminals are either dumb or naïve. It makes life a little less harrowing for those that walk the straight and narrow.