Police on MySpace

Police officers "consider MySpace one of their best resources," reports the Sacramento Bee in one of the first articles I've seen that lay out just *how* they use MySpace in investigations. "Whether officers are dealing with serious crimes or with youngsters whose worst offenses are inappropriate insults, they travel a similar investigative path. Start with a name or an event or an area. Find a person connected to it and then drill down, through friends and friends of friends, visiting their sites, riffling through their pictures, reading the correspondence they display publicly, and making printouts of anything incriminating." Bullying is what they expect to see at the middle school level. As for high school, one officer is described as keeping "an eye out for parties that are announced to the world, letting patrol officers know where the big bashes will be." That officer "recently spotted a photo of a bong that led to a student's arrest on drug and weapons charges…. Even when youngsters use aliases, their pictures, their friends' sites or other details often make them easy to track down. And even when a student's own site is fairly innocent, his or her face can still turn up in someone else's photo album of raunchy parties or worse, captured in embarrassing or illegal moments." But if teen MySpacers aren't yet thinking about police surveillance, they are responding to all the news reports about sexual predation. The Miami Herald reports that teens, "who often flirt with an adult world by pretending to be older than they actually are, are slowly stepping back into their teenage reality by revealing their true age and turning on [MySpace's] privacy filters. Anyone under 15 [actually 15 and 14, the official minimum age] automatically receives such filters." One 14-year-old told the Herald she doesn't even have an account "because of all the dangers that the Web site has." Other teens told Gannett New Jersey that media reports about the dangers are "overblown."