“Crowdsourcing” is one of those terms used by social-media insiders that, on its surface, doesn’t mean much to those of us just learning the ropes. When I began to see it repeated on Twitter and in blogs, I had to Google it.
What I found: in short, if outsourcing hands off a project to a single individual or business, then crowdsourcing hands off—if not a project—then an element of a project to an entire group: a customer base, a community.
The idea started with open source software projects. If you use the Firefox web browser, you know that all the different toolbars and other add-ons are the result of programmers using existing code to create specific tools for others to use.
The idea has grown, too. It has its pitfalls—Wikipedia, cited as the best known example of crowdsourcing, has also been criticized for inaccuracies—but in the business world, is even closer to participatory democracy than the focus group. That makes it a concept more government agencies should pay attention to.
So what does this have to do with crime prevention?
J.D. Lasica blogged about a very recent case in which a community came together to track down a bomb threat:
About six or seven historians and librarians tracked down the user ID and other information about the teenager who made the threat. They then used Twitter to exchange information and ideas about what steps to take.
In short, it was an online version of other recent incidents, in which customers and employees at two Starbucks coffee shops—one in Virginia and the other in Florida—intervened in somewhat violent thefts.
In another (somewhat more controversial) example, border patrol has been crowdsourced. But we’ll save that for another blog.
Do cops know they’re crowdsourcing?
More interesting than the fact that social media was used to catch the would-be bomber was the fact that first responders didn’t seem equipped to deal with the incoming calls:
McLellan phoned the St. Louis Police Department — which sent her to voicemail. She persisted but the officer said he “did not have access to the Web” and didn’t know how to get on the Web…. McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University in Ohio, then called a nearby police department known for being smart about cybercrime.
The SLPD’s response thereafter was swift; they did exactly what they were trained to do. But their initial response points up how important it is to begin to train regular patrol officers on how to handle social media.
In fact, dealing with high-tech crime in general has been an ongoing problem for cops who specialize in this area. Officers removing batteries from cell phones, for instance, believing that they were preserving memory (and thus, evidence), but instead wiping it clean. Officers accessing hard drives, altering evidence without meaning to.
Calls that come in based on Web sites, then, are not much different. True, most (as in child exploitation, or cyber harassment) will be referred to detectives.
But the more Web 2.0 empowers citizens to perceive that they have a fundamental ability to make a difference in events they witness, the more calls like this will come into police departments.
So, while leaders have the legitimate fear that Web access will be abused, they may need to take the risk of allowing at least limited access to officers to check out tips. Your take?
Popularity: 57% [?]
[...] get me wrong. I’m far from being against gun ownership, and I think the community should be actively involved in crime prevention. But the difference lies in whether they allow the police to do their jobs, or take matters into [...]
[...] behind you in the social spaces (think YouTube videos, Flickr photos, blogs, and other forms of crowdsourcing), might just do the [...]