The South African Police Service (SAPS) can make huge strides in combating crime by monitoring social media and other forms of digital communications.
So says Lindiwe Mkhize, account executive for the Public Security Business Unit at the SAS Institute, who notes that the number of law enforcement personnel being deployed to monitor social media has grown.
On the other hand, more and more criminals are using social media to pounce on unsuspecting victims. According to a Credit Sesame survey of 50 ex-burglars in England, 80% used Facebook, Twitter, Google Street View and Foursquare to plan their crimes.
Similarly, Mkhize mentions how incidents of violent protest action often feature prominently on perpetrators' social media accounts. For Mkhize, one has to question if law enforcement personnel are using all the tools at their disposal to effectively manage and plan for these situations. For example, she explains how social media is often used by protesters to comment on situations or to co-ordinate their activities.
"Unfortunately, systems are often basic and it requires too much police time and too many resources for the job to be done effectively. Consequently, agencies often fail to capitalise on the intelligence the approach could provide. These activities are placing added pressure on law enforcement to optimise the way they use social media and monitor the large volumes of unstructured data across social media networks."
Identifying trends
According to Paul Jacobson, director at WebTechLaw, police are monitoring the public Web. However, he noted that monitoring private profiles would probably require court orders and the relevant service's co-operation. He believes police can monitor social media mostly to identify trends and issues as they build.
"They might, for example, get a crowdsourced view of problem areas based on activity about certain areas, or they could even invite citizens to help build maps of, say, hijack zones using public collaboration tools like Ushahidi," he says. "There is a lot government bodies can do with social media that go beyond surveillance and can facilitate meaningful citizen participation in public safety."
He also points out that police have an opportunity to use social media to improve their effectiveness and to boost citizen participation. Nonetheless, he says if police use social media purely to spy on citizens, they should not expect much support from the public. "Criminals probably won't broadcast their activities on Twitter, so the police will probably only wind up persecuting the very people they should be protecting and collaborating with."
Mkhize believes that, in order for the police to use social media to curb criminal activity, high-quality analytics is key.
Ongoing analysis
She explains that text analytics technologies can sift through vast volumes of information generated on social media to reveal patterns and "zoom in" on content. She adds that social media analytics can provide ongoing analysis of online data, highlighting important topics and content categories and building links between networks of individuals.
"The key in all this, of course, is to identify potentially relevant information from the mass of background noise, thereby ensuring investigators are not swamped by wholly irrelevant information and can instead focus on what is most likely to be important."
In addition, she says, sentiment analytics can assess and monitor the sentiment of text to flag changing attitudes that may signal a shift from words to action. Allowing the technology to do the monitoring frees resources to intervene when an increased threat is identified, she adds.
"This type of capability will enable the professionals to identify the 'noise' within social media and focus on the data that could provide valuable intelligence. In particular, the use of sentiment analytics, combined with advanced risk modelling techniques, enables those individuals who pose the greatest potential threat to be identified, and action taken."
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