Essay On The Impact Of Social Media On Law Enforcement

The use of social media has become a growing form of communication within the law enforcement arenas. After the turn of century, many agencies have changed the traditional forms of one-to-one forms of to gather investigative information to using social media to gather the same information. Social media for crime investigations have been climbing to help solve crimes and help convict suspects.
In 2012, LexisNexis, surveyed some 1,200 law enforcement agencies that focused on the impact of social media on law enforcement in criminal investigations and found four out five respondents use social media platforms to assist in investigations . The research also found that “identifying people and locations; discovering criminal activity and locations; and gathering evidence are the top activities, while Facebook and YouTube are the most widely used platforms” . In fact, once found on social media, “87% of the time, search warrants utilizing social media to establish probable cause hold up in court when challenged, according to respondents” . Not only, this, while the majority of people who want to help don’t come forward in criminal investigations, many feel free to speak and post information on social media accounts.

For Example, in a 2007 gang shooting of David Valadez, the court upheld Ronnie Tienda [Smiley] MySpace/Facebook postings as evidence to convict him for the Dallas freeway shootout and murder of Valadez . In this case, the internal content of Tienda’s MySpace/Facebook postings—photographs, comments, and music—was sufficient circumstantial evidence where the jury found that the social media accounts owned by Tienda were created and maintained by him