Hopefully by now, you and your agency are using social media to document some important facts about your gang members or to help confirm criteria on your suspected gang members. If you are not yet taking advantage of this tool and any social media monitoring tools available, let’s consider some tips.

1. Start by creating a social media profile in order to monitor and possibly engage with other groups/gang members.
2. Monitor certain social media platforms or pages that might be of interest to gang members on   X, Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook.
3. Know your local slang, terminology, or hashtags used by gangs.
4. Look for location tags or geotags to help find areas of gang activity.
5. Look for visual indicators of gang members such as tattoos, symbols, or clothing in their profile pictures or posts.
6. Identify associates or other gang members by their posts and/or friends lists.
7. Set up alerts or get notifications when suspected gang members post something.
8. Verify online information through other sources to ensure its accuracy.
9. Collaborate with other officers and agencies to help enhance your efforts.
10. Consider software or online monitoring tools available such as Media Sonar, Snaptrends, and Digital Stakeout, that your department may want to invest in to further enhance surveillance.
11. Remember social media monitoring is just another tool in your tool belt. It is not a substitute for traditional police investigating, but it can aid or confirm information, along with your other techniques and interventions.

We also know most mass shooting suspects have left some type of message or threat on social media before taking action. By monitoring accounts or posts of any suspected violent offenders, and looking for hate speech, threats, an increased interest in violence or weapons, or a specific plan they may carry out, you may possibly anticipate criminal activity and potentially ensure public safety.

Do you have a process in place to identify and keep track of the social media activity of members in your community? Gangscope can help you with this. Our database can also identify vehicles, addresses, associates, nicknames, and much more. 

The GangScope Team

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GangScope™ is an intelligence database that helps capture, analyze, search and share intelligence on criminals, gangs, and more. GangScope acts as a first-tier, internal database that manages data on known and suspected criminals and gang members. Intelligence is collected per incident and can include qualifiers, associates, acquaintances (points of contact), witnesses, images, and documents. GangScope’s collection of detailed information aids in investigations, analysis and ultimately solving crime. The software complies with standards outlined by federal (28 CFR) policies. While complying with standards, GangScope™ boasts usability through simple yet extensive data mining via search, reports, profiles, and watches.

The overall goal of GangScope™ is to provide law enforcement personnel/ crime analysts/ correctional officers/prosecutors with maximum data through a friendly user interface while remaining cost-effective.  

A non-gang version – IntelScope is also available if needed.

To learn more or to schedule a full demo of our system – request a demo here. We would welcome the opportunity to show you how Gangscope can help your department organize and store your data in a secure and compliant way.