Calif. police hop on social media.....New tools turn social media into evidence collection.

OFF THE WIRE

The San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office is joining many of its brethren in law enforcement in ramping up its social media presence.
The Record
FRENCH CAMP, Calif. — The San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office is joining many of its brethren in law enforcement, most notably the Stockton Police Department, in ramping up its social media presence to establish new means of communications with the public.
Anyone can now follow the Sheriff's Office on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Nixle.
"It's something we have been working on. We've had success with our first Facebook page," Sheriff Steve Moore said Monday, referring to the "San Joaquin County Sheriff's Unsolved Homicide/Missing Persons" page launched two years ago. "And we're well-aware of the Stockton Police Department's success with their social media."
A new cadet with the Sheriff's Office, a student at University of the Pacific who is current on social media applications, is helping to set up the sites. The new social media effort will be managed by the sheriff's public affairs unit.
Alerts, news, events and photos will be added to the sites as they are made publicly available, the sheriff said.
"We hope it will be an investigational aid to get information out faster, and we hope the public can respond with more information," Moore said. "It's just another conduit."

Some of the sites may take a few days to be available on search engines, according to department spokesman Deputy Les Garcia.

New tools turn social media into evidence collection
A new technology scans sites like Twitter to act as a virtual stakeout, alerting police when possibly gang activity is occurring...
By Martin Kaste
NPR.org
Social media monitoring started in the world of marketing, allowing companies to track what people were saying about their brands. But now, with software that allows users to scan huge volumes of public postings on social media, police are starting to embrace it as well. In the U.S., a company called BrightPlanet sells a product that is more explicitly marketed as an investigative tool.
"If you had 1,500 gang members, like we do in Detroit — we have their handles, so we're able to identify what the gang members are doing," says BrightPlanet Vice President Tyson Johnson.
The tool, called BlueJay, is capable of scanning the entire "fire hose" of tweets, he says — far more than is available to search from the Twitter Web page. It can be configured to focus on tweets coming from certain places, and it can collect instant photographic evidence from a disturbance.

"If we'd been able to monitor real-time during the Boston Marathon, they'd have an immediate repository to interrogate, as soon as the bombs happened," Johnson says.