To be fair most people have some braincells and do not brag about “major crimes” on FB. what the coppers are also counting here is people arguing on it and threatening each other and then it actually escalating into a physical fight, which is rife in the redneck villages round here. But they would have used fixed and mobile telephones before that, which the coppers are well aware of (many of them work closely with the boffins at rat salad park who monitor our telecoms networks).
The bigger problem for us is that lots of people do things that they do not feel are crimes, but others do such as low level dealing using laundered benefits money. And Farcebook is way too open and easy to get info on people. I don’t even use it, and yet just by using what is open and on the public bits accessible via google I can find out a ton of info about many people including their friends, music tastes, political views, the region they live in, whether or not they are in work, and then piece this together with other info from google to locate them.
I do not have any access to info greater than that of any normal civillian, so just imagine what the Police are able to do…
I read in some IT trade website that the East Anglian constabularies and the BT boffins actually went over to London after the riots and shared their techniques with metpol as they had used them successfully against “local youth criminality”. But East Anglia is a relatively quiet, safe area and the only large scale youth criminality in recent years (going by mainstream social norms, not ours) was that associated with unlicensed music events and the use and dealing of drugs.
