Social interaction among teens and youths increasingly occurs in the digital world via the use of social media. Social media has become a central facet of the lives of many youth. As the internet becomes more ubiquitous, more Americans have web access. More young men and women in the inner city and in other poverty-stricken communities now participate in social media. Among these youth are gang members. Searching for the adoration of their peers, many of these young men and women post pictures and status updates that incriminate either themselves or their friends. As the digital world takes on more prominence, gang culture has made its own imprint on the social media landscape.
In response, police departments across the United States are using social media as a tool against street gangs. These departments use a variety of techniques, ranging from network analysis to impersonation. Network analysis examines the social media profiles of at-risk users, determining the likelihood of the person becoming involved in gang activity. Officers also create fake social media accounts to get better access to gang members. According to a recent Lexis Nexis survey, over 81% of law enforcement officials use social media in some way as a part of their investigations. Though not all these departments are using social media to specifically target gang members, the prevalence of social media usage within police departments speaks to both a ubiquity and pseudo-expertise that brings up implications as to policing protections. These implications are especially shocking in that most law enforcement agencies still do not have an official social media policy.
The police use social media to both to find evidence of past and ongoing 
gang crime, as well as to develop an understanding of fang networks. Through the use of social media monitoring, police officers can determine who is connected to which gang, as well as get a sense of the relationships between different gangs and different gang members. Though less valuable for proving a conviction, knowing the relationships between different gang members and different factions can lead to better policing via analysis of networks. This networks analysis can highlight particular trouble spots, potential criminal activity, and developing issues with the gang community.
This type of network analysis may bring up issues of First Amendment free speech protections, as they lead to the creation of digital dossiers on suspected gang members. These dossiers create the potential for punishing suspected gang members by association, without necessarily the suspected gang members having committed any crimes. Furthermore, these network analyses are not nuanced, in that they can and will include those who may have once been gang members, but have since left. However, much of the information used by the police departments to create these dossiers is publicly available enough to possibly allow use of such evidence to skirt current protections.
The police are also able to use social media to collect admissible evidence in criminal trials. Because the culture of braggadocio and the desire for adoration, some gang members and suspected gang members post status updates and pictures of their participation in illegal activity. Though these suspected gang members often set their profiles to private, police often create fake profiles that allow police officers using fake account to insinuate themselves into the confidence of gang members. The evidence gained here may be useful in convicting actual criminals, it can also create false positives, specifically because gang culture is so concerned with braggadocio and hyperbole.
Though law enforcement social media strategies continue to develop, jurisprudence and academic study of the phenomenon are currently inadequate to create a consistent, unitary way to handle social media and its implications as to constitutional protections. See James R. O’Connor, Asocial Media: Cops, Gangs, and the Internet, 42 Hofstra L. Rev. 647 (2013).
Links in this article
http://www.lexisnexis.com/risk/downloads/whitepaper/2014-social-media-use-in-law-enforcement.pdf
http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-social-media-transforms-chicago-policing.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/when-cops-check-facebook/390882/
James R. O’Connor, Asocial Media: Cops, Gangs, and the Internet, 42 Hofstra L. Rev. 647 (2013)
Photo: Photo of a Norwood, MA officer using social media to inform citizens, http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/norwood/2012/09/norwood_police_put_social_medi.html
