Social media and the mob

Aug. 28, 2012

Thirty kids walk into a 7-11. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but few would laugh at what surveillance cameras captured next. The video, released by Montgomery County (Maryland) Police, shows the looters entering the convenience store early on a Saturday morning and making off with $450 worth of drinks, candy and snacks. Call it what you will, “flash mobs”, “flash robs” or “….” As they are sometimes referred, are essentially the evil twin of the cute, choreographed dance routines at train stations and public parks, though they typically follow the same MO. Instead these chaotic gatherings usually involve theft, criminal damage to property, and sometimes violence. Like the word “flash,” the suspects assemble as quickly as they disperse. Collaborators agree upon a time and a place, usually via social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, and overwhelm shop owners.

Flash mobs themselves are still rare occurrences. The mob that descended upon the 7-11 in Germantown on August 15, 2011 wasn’t particularly violent, but it did stun the community. Anyone can find the footage online and skim comments from the peanut gallery. But it is how Montgomery County reacted to the event—how they utilized surveillance tools, community relationships and social media outlets to their advantage—that calls for further review.

Smile, you’re on camera

Immediately after the video circulated, phone started ringing. Teachers, parents and students called up and identified 90 percent of the kids involved in the case, and officers made arrests. Montgomery County police then joined the principal at the school that was most affected and showed the footage to its students.

“Years ago when they would put out a picture of a bank robber, the picture was always so blurry and grainy and you could never really tell who the person was because the quality of the picture was so bad,” says Commander Luther Reynolds from the fifth district of the Montgomery Co. PD. “Well now the quality of these cameras and the quality of the video is such that people look at these videos.”

Government and business have come a long way in surveillance tech. Where legacy VHS cameras lack the ability to zoom in on somebody’s face, legions of new and upcoming video equipment is much more affordable. With digital equipment, investigators can easily zoom in on a particular face, tattoo or T-shirt.

The video did more than document the mob as it occurred; it stripped away the anonymity of each participant. The department chose to make the incident a teachable moment. We [asked], ‘is this what you want to be reflective of the youth in our community’? And of course, 99 percent of youth were really embarrassed by what happened. There was a lot of positive peer pressure, a lot of engagement of the youth as to how egregious this was.

It’s rare that you get everybody on the same page, but everybody … came together, even people from the faith community and other groups came together and said we need to do something about this. This can’t happen again.”

Now Montgomery County is looking to improve security in other parts of their community, such as the downtown area of Silver Spring. Police Chief Thomas Manger spoke with elected officials about the need for additional security cameras in areas with a lot of foot traffic—not only as a crime deterrent, but as an investigative tool. He would especially like to build up a series of cameras on Germantown’s busiest streets that are all connected, and that can be monitored by people in a joint command center. “It’s a force-multiplier,” says Manger, drawing from command and operation centers he has seen in places like Great Britain and Israel. However, he adds, they’d be starting from scratch. Although Montgomery Co. does not have any cameras in its downtown, they do have great relationship with its business communities, meaning they can and do access these cameras for various cases.

The new underground consortium

“I think that we’re nearer the beginning and the middle in understanding how technology can be used to commit crime, as well as how technology can be used to prevent and make arrests after a crime has been committed,” says Dr. Scott Decker, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University. Decker studies gangs, violence and juvenile justice. His book, International Handbook of Juvenile Justice was published in 2006. Decker points out flash mobs like the one that occurred in Germantown, Maryland, are “classic adolescent and juvenile behaviors” as they occur in a group, there’s a group process, and they pull in “fringe kids” who may not normally be involved.

The best security system in the world will not anticipate mob activity before it happens (although some companies are certainly working on this, by building predictive analysis ability into surveillance programs). That’s where a careful eye on social medial comes into play. In the course of the last year, Decker worked with a team that interviewed over 600 people in five cities who were on probation in gang outreach programs, and considered “at-risk” for involvement crime.

“Their adoption of technology over the course of the last couple of years has really been meteoric,” recalls Decker. “When you see a flash mob and you see it facilitated by technology, particularly Twitter but sometimes Facebook and other social networking sites, it reflects both the penetration of technology into these newer groups, but also characteristics of these groups … ages and other interests.” Decker says that while there are many hundreds o f millions of people on Facebook (and 900 million worldwide), the social networking behemoth is still heavily concentrated among younger people and their technological know-how. This is a huge factor in the how flash mobs facilitate; with Twitter, one person can send a message to 1000 other people with just one click. But where social media is the hub of underground fraternization, it is also, rather consistently, the smoking gun.

“When we think of contemporary LE, we still think of cars and patrol,” says Decker. “I go on ride-along and search warrants from time to time and the real dramatic change … over the last five years is that now you look for the cell phones, the hard drives, the thumb drives. Electronic media storage is the most valuable thing you can get in a search warrant, and that’s a real change for law enforcement.”

Making friends with Facebook

Most agencies do have a strong social media presence to the point where social media is now a necessity in modern-day policing efforts. (Reference IACP survey: of 500 agencies across 49 states, 81 percent were using social media as a form of public outreach), “As best we can, we have folks who monitor a lot of different sites,” says Manger.

Nick Newman at the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) has trained over 3000 state, local, Federal and tribal law enforcement officials in the country in computer crimes and forensics. In regards to flash rob violence, Newman says: “It is always the fear of the unknown … and how are we going to be able to respond to that.” He adds the biggest concerns for law enforcement include how to find information on Twitter, and also how to document evidence on social media so that it can be used in court.

NW3C is currently developing training that will show how to do just that. The two-day course will address the major social networks and websites that utilize social content, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Says Newman: “The big advantage to using Twitter is one person can use their cell phone, and who doesn’t have a cell phone in their pocket? That’s good for law enforcement as well, because every time that Tweet is sent out, that’s one more thing law enforcement can [use] to investigate.”

YouTube may be an especially important player in flash robs, as participants sometimes post video content of the actual crime. Newman calls this a “dream situation” where law enforcement has got multiple angles of a crime, from security cameras to every Smartphone on the scene, recording.

Say someone posts a mob video online. What happens next? “The first thing law enforcement would do is determine who is the owner of that profile,” says Newman. “If it was a YouTube video they would find out the IP address information for whoever posted the video and then go from there. Odds are, the person who posted the video is either one of the people involved, or they know somebody who was. So it’s very important for law enforcement to leverage social media as a form of evidence.”

Jeremiah Johnson, also a trainer at NW3C, adds that if agencies don’t already have a social media presence, now is the time to get one or more accounts. “If you don’t already have one, you should, because you don’t know who’s going to fill in that gap for you where you don’t have control over it.” Anyone can set up a Twitter or Facebook account. If an agency doesn’t set up its own account first, they may not have control over their name. “Even if you use it as a placeholder, it’s better to have it up and running,” says Johnson.

Real-world friends

Immediately following the Germantown flash mob, Chief Manger consulted with other agencies informally to get their take on the experience. He also reached out to the Police Executive Research Forum—or PERF—a non-profit police research organization that provides management services, technical assistance and executive-level education and support to law enforcement agencies. PERF has recently held discussions about the Occupy movement, which Manger feels bears some similarity to flash mobs in terms of tactics and gathering information, intelligence and building relationship with groups.

Agencies shouldn’t wait until their own flash rob to begin building relationships within their communities. “When we dealt with the flash mob in Germantown, I was immediately getting phone calls,” says Reynolds. “Over the weekend, when it hit the news from school principles, they had my cell phone and were calling saying, ‘Hey Luther, you know we’ve recognized some of the faces already … we can meet Monday morning and help you begin identifying these people.” Everyone got involved. The 7-11 where the incident occurred trained its staff on best practices and how best to report such an event.

Luther says during the “7-11 interviews” they spoke to “some good kids involved in a group that were just doing bad things. And when they got charged and got arrested, and they interacted with the schools, it really sent a clear message to a lot of other people that had a real positive impact on preventing future events.”

Dr. Decker adds that for a long time “The widespread publicity about surveillance cameras and the YouTube playing field has been dominated by the bad guys, and … only recently have the good guys [have] begun to use YouTube and Twitter,” He cites the Philadelphia Police Department which now has a very strong application of Twitter for crime notification and reporting, in real-time.

Technology is sometimes part of the problem, but it is also the solution. The outcome of events sometime depends simply on who has the upper hand.

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