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.
