SPF

The SPF posts pictures of individuals who are wanted for various crimes and an explanation of why those individuals are wanted. They also post crime prevention information as well as other beneficial information for their “fans.” For a message to have impact it has to reach followers, or in Facebook page measurement you need to have ‘fans” following you so they can see your message. Otherwise you message just blows with the wind and no one sees it. To the SPF’s credit they have about 9300 visitors today since their page went live in April of 2009. The SPF get it. They get the fact that social media has benefit as a law enforcement tool. But, social media is not the end all be all, it is merely a “new enforcement tool.”

Why are the SPF and other law enforcement agencies wasting their time playing around with social media? Because there are 330 million people on Facebook and this number goes up everyday. Although, the SPF only have 9300 fans, whatever they post on their fan page can be shared by any one of their followers. Depending on a followers number of followers your message could reach a whole lot of people, for free. Exponential viral communication takes hold and you could potentially have millions of people see the picture and information surrounding a wanted person, crime prevention tips, etc. This concept is not that hard to understand. It is a little discouraging to know that not all law enforcement agencies are using Facebook as a law enforcement tool. The only cost associated with a Facebook fan page is the time it takes to set it up and manage it. Of course this cost is labor and if this is not already being done by someone, it is hard to get started due to time, money, other assigned duties. Especially from a government angle during this period of poor economics there is a loss of tax dollars, there are employee cutbacks, etc. It is going to take a visionary law enforcement executives to implement social media into their communication plan.

What does the devils advocate say? Although, the SPF have been putting up wanted individual pictures they have not made any arrests from this effort. Could it be the way individuals have to communicate the knowledge they have of the wanted people? If they communicate out in public on their Facebook wall then the bad person may be tipped off or worse yet possibly be vindictive towards the would be tipster. The SPF solve this by providing a 1-800 number to report the leads to help capture the wanted person. This is a great conversion tool, taking the online communication to offline action (brilliant). There could also be fake accounts made with false tips provided, but this already happens through phone communication. There are always going to be some drawbacks or “pros” and “cons” in using social media as a law enforcement tool. But, from my perspective the “pros” far outweigh the “cons.”

The use of Facebook as a crime enforcement, crime prevention, and information tool by law enforcement should be mandatory by any government agency (local or federal) that cares about protecting their citizens. A little dramatic, no! Common sense, yes! By the way, law enforcement agencies, Facebook is not the only agency that you can leverage free communication while engaging in social media. MySpace, Twitter, and many others fit your communication models where your citizens are spending large amounts of time each day.