The use of social media in investigations is not new. The NYPD launched its Social Media Unit in 2011, and by 2018 the Major Cities Chiefs Association reported that roughly three-fourths of agencies surveyed had units dedicated to open source research and/or social media analysis. Those numbers reflect the ability of large law enforcement agencies to direct personnel and financial resources toward leveraging social media’s investigative potential.
For smaller LEAs, however, standing up a full-time social media investigations unit is usually out of reach. Yet even a single officer willing and able to take on the social media beat can yield results: A decade ago, the San Francisco PD’s “Instagram officer” attracted attention through his then-novel use of social media for intelligence-gathering.
While that example comes from a large department, it is a nice illustration of just how effective one-man operations can be. So, with that in mind, let’s examine a number of approaches small departments can use to effectively harness social media for investigations.
1. Start With Your Most Social-Savvy Personnel
Social media use is now prevalent enough that even a relatively modest rural or small-town police department typically boasts a number of front-line officers who are more than familiar with the major social media platforms and their use. Investigators who start from a position of familiarity are better able to navigate those platforms’ social norms and conventions, making them more effective (and efficient) than those who lack that basic understanding.
Other analysts or civilian investigators may also be leveraged to scrutinize social media and forward links or screenshots to investigators on an ad hoc basis, essentially curating a subset of pertinent posts that can help streamline investigative efforts.
2. Look Beyond the Big Platforms
A handful of large and well-known platforms dominate the social media landscape. Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Snapchat, and LinkedIn are all well-established players, and X alternative, Bluesky, is rapidly gaining ground. While they collectively boast billions of users, less-obvious apps and sites also provide fertile ground for investigators.
YouTube and Pinterest, for example, aren’t primarily thought of as social media but nevertheless rank among the most-used social sites in Pew Research’s data. Other platforms, including discussion site Reddit, chat platforms such as Discord, online special-interest forums, and even some dating apps all provide varying degrees of social interaction and social media functionality. Many of these less-obvious platforms are used by criminals to communicate with each other or (in the case of drugs and other contraband) potential buyers. While it is unrealistic to expect one or two investigators to manually search all of those platforms, a specialized tool like Spokeo for Law Enforcement can make such searches quick and simple.
3. Draw On Your Local Knowledge
Smaller jurisdictions can benefit from their “everybody knows everybody’s business” real-world social networks. Connections that your investigators have observed in the real world, or overheard in casual conversation when on- or off-duty, can provide the basis for a targeted and effective social media investigation.
A made-for-purpose search tool like Spokeo can turn that local knowledge – whether in the formal form of prior arrest records, or something as informal as coffee-shop gossip – into actionable intelligence. Even incomplete or cryptic information (“I hear Kevin’s cousin’s kid is selling…”) can quickly be turned into a firm identification by starting from the known individual and following the connections Spokeo’s data reveals from there. Almost any verifiable data can serve as a starting point, whether a real name, a known alias, a known associate, a phone number, an email, an online username, or a physical address. From there, Spokeo’s billions of data points, from thousands of sources, can help tease out otherwise hidden connections.
4. Master the Hashtags and Slang
Online criminal activities, including ransomware, hacking, sextortion, and “pig butchering” scams are innately digital. Yet many crimes taking place in your own community – including break-and-enter rings, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking, just to name a few – now revolve around transactions and marketing efforts that are conducted openly on social media platforms. This presents an opportunity for investigators because the necessity of reaching out to potential customers precludes the kind of operational security that more sophisticated criminals engage in.
To solicit business online without attracting unwelcome attention from police departments, criminals, middlemen, and potential customers typically use slang terms or hashtags that are current within that community, but meaningless or innocuous to outsiders. Every successful arrest becomes an opportunity to learn this code when you have access to a good social media search tool. Seeking out offenders’ social platforms, and examining them for such coded phrases and hashtags, can help you create a “dictionary,” which you can then search in order to identify potential customers or associates of the criminals you’ve already detected.
5. Learn To Connect Real-World Identities To Online “Handles”
Tying a real individual with a verifiable identity to social media accounts is one of the most difficult — and most fundamental — aspects of social media investigation. Many social media platforms explicitly permit anonymity or pseudonymity, and the identity-verification processes used by other platforms are easily defeated. Further complications include accidental or deliberate misspellings and alternate spellings, nicknames, and the sheer number of people who legitimately share the same name or very similar names. For a small department with limited staffing to parse those obstacles and explicitly tie an online account to a real person, especially in a way that will stand up in court, is a daunting task.
This is exactly what a tool like Spokeo for Law Enforcement is designed to address. Searches can begin with a known name, phone number, or email and move forward to find its affiliated social media accounts; or they can begin with the username or “handle” of a given social media account and work backward to the real person behind the account. Searches take only seconds, with Spokeo’s clean and simple interface, and can generate a staggering volume of information. Data retrieved from the initial searches can then fuel further searches, teasing out the entire online presence of your person of interest.
6. Map Relationships Between Individuals To Uncover Hidden Networks
Gaining a fuller picture of an individual’s social media presence creates an opportunity for investigators to dig deeper, exploring connections and interactions with others. Every friend or follower, every comment, and everyone appearing in a photo with the subject of your original searches can lead to further meaningful data. This does not, by any means, imply that everyone who interacts with your person of interest necessarily shares in their illicit activities. But searching all of these contacts in turn can often generate enough new data to quickly triage them by their likelihood of engaging in criminality.
Mapping out those connections, especially if you’ve already gained some insight into the jargon and hashtags used for specific criminal activities, can help you build a fuller picture of alliances and rivalries within the local criminal community. In some cases, it may even be possible to identify a contact serving as a link between local criminal figures and larger crime organizations in other areas. This information, when shared with LEAs in larger centers, can help trace a chain of connections between the “little fish” at the street level in your own community and the “big fish” elsewhere.
7. Seek Out Sources of Training, Funding, and Mentorship
Small-jurisdiction policing inevitably places the department in competition for funding with other local priorities. Even in emergency or crisis situations, such as a sharp increase in drug or sex trafficking, or gang violence, an increased budget allowance this year may be followed by a return to previous levels of funding or even a reduction.
Seeking out other sources of funding, technology, and mentorship can help small LEAs work around those budget limitations. If your department belongs to (or joins) the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, for example, membership includes training for law enforcement in the detection of such crimes. Larger departments in nearby metropolitan areas may be willing to extend training and mentorship opportunities to smaller forces in surrounding areas, to help address criminal activity that overlaps your jurisdictions. It’s also worth noting that some providers of police-centric software tools, including Spokeo, include extensive training and technical support as part of the purchase price or subscription fee.
8. Communicate With Larger LEAs On Cross-Jurisdictional Crimes
In a similar vein, larger departments in nearby jurisdictions often have better resources for social media investigations. Liaising with those personnel can provide significant opportunities for intelligence-sharing between your respective departments, giving your own investigators a head start. This can include crucial details such as the hashtags and coded slang used online by criminals, which larger departments may see more frequently and be better prepared to master.
Similarly, information generated in your own department may at times provide a key link between a given crime and a person of interest. LEAs in small communities can benefit from an insider’s knowledge of local personalities, relationships, and shared cultural references that might not catch an outsider’s eye. That inside knowledge can fuel your own local investigations, and potentially generate meaningful data or evidence that’s of value to your partner agency in the city. When approached in good faith, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
The Best Tool For the Job is One That Fits
The sheer volume of information shared on social media is what makes it valuable for investigations, but also what makes it challenging. Multiple software tools have emerged to address that need, offering a range of search and analytics capabilities. Unfortunately, many of those tools are marketed primarily to LEAs with substantial financial and IT resources to dedicate to social media investigations. Smaller departments, with tighter budgets and personnel constraints, have fewer options at their disposal.
Spokeo for Law Enforcement is an exception, providing outstanding performance and superior handling of social media searches with subscription plans that can scale to meet the needs of both the largest and smallest departments with equal ease. It’s also suited for departments with little to no IT support, thanks to its clean and intuitive interface, simple management dashboard, and our live, US-based support team.
To learn more about Spokeo’s capabilities and potential uses in law enforcement, to request a demonstration, or to arrange a no-cost trial of the product on your own site, reach out to our team using the contact information on our Law Enforcement page.
Sources
New York Daily News: NYPD Forms New Social Media Unit to Mine Facebook and Twitter for Mayhem
Major Cities Chiefs Association: Critical Issues for Intelligence Commanders
Smithsonian Magazine: Law and Order: Social Media Unit
Pew Research: Social Media Fact Sheet
Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program: Training